Linguistic flim

Transcription

Linguistic flim

2OO8
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© British and American Studies, vol. XIV, 2008
and electronically
CONTENTS
“POST”-DILEMMAS
MICHAEL CHAPMAN
POSTCOLONIALISMA LITERARY TURN / 7
PIA BRÎNZEU
“POSTCOLONIALISM” OR “POSTCOLONIALISMS”?: THE
DILEMMAS OF A TEACHER / 21
ILEANA SORA DIMITRIU
POSTMODERNISM AND/ AS POSTCOLONIALISM:ON REREADING MILAN KUNDERA AND BREYTEN
BREYTENBACH / 33
ELISABETTA MARINO
FROM BRICK LANE TO ALENTEJO BLUE: CROSS-CULTURAL
ENCOUNTERS IN MONICA ALI’S WRITINGS / 51
DANIELA ROGOBETE
PROTEAN IDENTITIES AND INVISIBLE BORDERS IN HARI
KUNZRU’S THE IMPRESSIONIST / 59
MARIA ªTEFÃNESCU
AN ARTIST OF FLOATING WOR(L)DS / 71
ANDREEA ªERBAN
CANNIBALISED BODIES. MARGARET ATWOOD’S
METAPHORS OF TROUBLED IDENTITIES / 79
ANDREEA TEREZA NIÞIªOR
TWO INSTANCES OF THE FRAGMENTARY IN THE
POSTMODERN NOVEL: ITALO CALVINO’S IF ON A WINTER’S
NIGHT A TRAVELER AND ANNIE PROULX’S THE SHIPPING
NEWS / 89
CRISTINA CHEVEREªAN
DEARLY BELOVED:TONI MORRISON’S RESURRECTION OF
THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN NARRATIVE / 105
JACQUES RAMEL
UNDEAF YOUR EARS: WHAT THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD II
GIVES US TO HEAR / 113
KLAUDIA PAPP
INSCRIPTION AND ENCRYPTION: DAPHNE DU MAURIER’S
REBECCA / 121
CLAUDIA IOANA DOROHOLSCHI
WILLIAM MORRIS’S CHILD CHRISTOPHER AND GOLDILIND
THE FAIR: MEDIEVALISM AND THE ANTI-NATURALISM OF
THE 1890S / 129
ANNIE RAMEL
THE WHEEL OF DESIRE IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS / 139
DANA PERCEC
BARRY UNSWORTH AND THE HISTORICAL NOVEL
TODAY / 151
TERESA BELA
NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE IN THE EARLY NOVELS OF PIERS
PAUL READ / 161
ISTVÁN D. RÁCZ
WHAT IS “ALMOST TRUE”: LARKIN AND KEATS / 171
CLAIRE CRABTREE-SINNETT
INTENSITIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS DELUSION, DREAM, AND
DELIRIUM IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MRS. DALLOWAY AND
KATHERINE ANN PORTER’S “PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER” / 181
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B.A.S. vol. XIV, 2008
CULTURAL SPECULATIONS
CHAD WEIDNER
“THE GREAT GOD PAN IS DEAD!” THE ECOLOGICAL ELEGY
OF WILLIAM BURROUGHS’ GHOST OF CHANCE / 195
MARIA BAJNER
THE POWER OF ATTRACTION IN THE NARRATIVE OF SOAP
OPERAS / 207
ERIC GILDER,
THE PEDIGREE OF AMERICA’S CONSTITUTION:AN
MERVYN HAGGER
ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION / 217
DANA VASILIU
THE MEDIEVAL SOCIAL HIERARCHY: FROM CONGREGATIO
FIDELIUM TO SOCIETAS HUMANA / 227
MAGDA DANCIU
THE END OF THE JOURNEY: BACK TO SCOTLAND / 237
IRINA DIANA MÃDROANE
TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES: ROMANIA AND EUROPEAN
VALUES IN OFFICIAL VS. FORUM DISCOURSES / 247
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
DELIA ROBESCU
LINGUISTIC RESOURCES OF BIAS IN NEWS DISCOURSE / 265
STEEN SCHOUSBOE
LINGUISTIC FLIM-FLAM? / 275
PREDRAG NOVAKOV
ENGLISH PRESENT PERFECT: ASPECTUAL AND TEMPORAL
COMPONENTS / 283
DARIA PROTOPOPESCU
ON DEPICTIVES, MANNER AND TRANSPARENT ADVERBS IN
ENGLISH AND ROMANIAN / 293
ADINA OANA NICOLAE
MACHINES AND TOOLS IN ECONOMIC METAPHORS / 305
HORTENSIA PÂRLOG
HIS COCKLE HAT / 315
ALBERT VERMES
CONTEXTUAL ASSUMPTIONS AND THE TRANSLATOR’S
STRATEGY. A CASE STUDY / 331
NATALIA VID
POLITICAL - IDEOLOGICAL TRANSLATIONS OF ROBERT
BURNS’ POETRY IN THE SOVIET UNION / 343
“POST”-DILEMMAS
POSTCOLONIALISM
A LITERARY TURN
MICHAEL CHAPMAN
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban
Abstract: The paper poses a Commonwealth (more generally, a South)
challenge to British (or northern institutional) delineations of the postcolonial.
It is suggested that globalisation and postcoloniality represent interlocking
categories, in which the political supersedes the literary. The argument here, in
contrast, pursues a literary turn.
Is there a role for literature — or, to be specific, imaginative literature,
or the literary — in postcolonial studies? And where may one locate my own
country, South Africa, or any other marginalised country, for example
Romania, in a field delineated by northern, that is, U.S., British, institutional
purposes, practices, paradigms and, more pragmatically, career/publishing
opportunities?
Having developed as a set of conceptual and perceptual resources for
the study of the effects on people’s lives of colonial modernity — from its
Renaissance expansions to contemporary manifestations of global capital
— postcolonialism has come to describe heterogeneous, though linked,
groupings of critical enterprises: a critique of Western totalising narratives;
a revision of the Marxian class project; utilisation of both poststructural
enquiry (the displaced linguistic subject) and postmodern pursuit (scepticism of the truth claims of Cartesian individualism); the condition of both
nativist longing for independence from the metropolitan power and recognition of the failure of the decolonisation trajectory; a marker for voices of
pronouncement by non-resident, ‘Third-World’ intellectual cadres in ‘FirstWorld’ universities. More positively from the perspective of the South — if,
indeed, postcolonialism, as Robert J.C. Young has it, is a mark of “the West’s
own undoing” (2001: 65) — there is a focusing of the ethical and imaginative lens on expression, writing, and testimony outside of, or in tangential
relation to, the metropolitan centre-space. Such a focus, in curricular
design, involves new selections of texts and revised reading practices
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prompted by what was earlier called Commonwealth literature or, more
recently, new literatures in English or, simply, the new englishes.
I refer lastly in the above list to literary matters. For postcolonialism
identifies its priorities not as literary, but as political or ideological. Again to
quote Young, who visited South Africa under the auspices of a project,
Postcolonialism: A South/African Perspective:
The assumption of postcolonial studies is that many of the wrongs, if not
crimes, against humanity are a product of the economic dominance of the
north over the south. In this way, the historical role of Marxism in the history of anti-colonial resistance remains paramount as a fundamental
framework of postcolonial thinking. Postcolonial theory operates within
the historical legacy of Marxist critique...which it simultaneously transforms according to the precedent of the greatest tricontinental anti-colonial intellectual politicians (2001: 6).
With tricontinental referring here to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, it
is indeed political figures, or at least philosophical spokespersons, not literary people, who feature most prominently in Young’s monumental
Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001), from which the above
passage is taken.
There is seemingly a paradox here. For postcolonialism has sought to
accord value to the personal or human dimension — the effects on people’s
lives — of asymmetrical power relations between North and South. The
field — however mixed in its material and cultural presuppositions — has
struck, continues to strike, a chord in literature departments which, as
Young has noted, constitute the “solitary space within academic institutions
where subjective forms of knowledge were taken seriously” (2001: 64). Yet
a literary turn — my qualifier to the title of this paper — requires defence
not only because of its marginalisation in postcolonial political mapping and
revisionism, but also because of its status in the field as handmaiden to theory. In its discursive categorisations — its Foucauldian acts of enunciation
by which the postcolonial formulates the condition of its own possibility
(see Foucault 1970) — postcolonial theory predominates as sense-maker,
or event-maker, over and above the experiential terrain to which its theory
directs its diagnostic or emblematic or, too often, its obscurantist pronunciations. After twenty-five years of northern institutional postcolonialism — its
beginning is usually tied to the publication of Edward Said’s entirely lucid
study, Orientalism (1978) — we encounter a repetitious opposition between
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
the ‘framework ideas’, principally, of Said, Spivak and Bhabha, designated
compositely as the linguistic-cultural or poststructural turn, and the ‘conflict
ideas’ of a persistent Marxist materialism in, among others, Ahmad and San
Juan Jr (see also Ali 1993, and Parry 2004). In what too often is reminiscent
of binary argument, the theory or methodology stands the danger of replicating the very power positions it wishes to challenge: “the West and the
rest of us” (see Chinwezu 1975).
The ordering of the questions, in consequence, has led to scepticisms
emanating from those of ‘South’ identity. Such scepticisms are summarised
in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s wicked parody — does he, ensconsed in the
northern university, include himself in his parody? — of postcoloniality as
“the condition of a relatively small western-style, western-trained group of
writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of
world capitalism at the periphery” (1992: 63). What constitutes a nation;
what, an ethnic group; what, the new world order; what may oppose the
hegemony of U.S. imperialism? These questions characterise the utopian
agenda of postcolonialism: the aim being a just social or, more precisely, a
socialist world, in which class is again granted significant explanatory
power, and in which the issues of race, gender, and the translation of cultures are posited upon the value of difference. In such an agenda, difference, or différance (see Derrida 1978), does not confirm division, but transforms ‘othering’ from negative to positive premise.
The utopian model, however, may be as totalising in its configuration
as the narrative of Enlightenment-modernity against which, in almost
mantra-like reaction (race, class, the unfinished business of gender), postcolonialism regularly pits its opposition. Its cultural materialist tendency
seeks to resurrect a Leftish programme of social action in the wake of
Thatcherism and, now, in reaction to U.S. capitalist and military adventurism (see Young 2001, Lazarus 2004, and Loomba et al 2005). The emphasis
on difference opposes what in neo-liberal global-speak is termed the convergence of markets. That the study of postcolonial literature has not in itself
pushed the boundaries, to quote Tariq Ali (1993), of “market realism” — a
preference for the elite work in English that is not entirely alien to the suppositions and conventions of Western modernist or postmodernist genre or
style — represents an irony of an anti-metropole endeavour located within
the corridors of the metropolitan institution.
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Where or how do critics of literature position themselves in a project
which elevates sociological or economic analysis, or the discourses of philosophy or politics, over and above literary intervention, and in which literature, when it does engage attention, is subjected to issue-driven interpretation. As E. San Juan Jr phrases it, literature is regarded as “an instance of
concrete political practice which reflects the dynamic process of the national democratic revolution in the developing countries” (1998: 254).
This formulation promises little more than a return to an earlier economistic base/superstructure rigidity. To which a critic of the linguistic turn —
Homi K. Bhabha, for example — might respond that, no, the literary text,
indeed the subject in its subjectivity, is characterised not simply as materialist reflection, but as rhetorical, performative act. Accordingly, meaning
emerges in the textual palimpsest, deconstructively, or against the grain of
full intent, in the slippages, in the ‘in-between’, the ‘liminal’, or ‘Third
Space’. It is here that coloniser and colonised interact: not in the binary
oppositions of master and slave, but in more intricate, more devious sparrings. In the ‘sly civilities’ of the hybridised encounter — we are told, following Heidegger’s insight that a boundary is not where matters stop, but
where newness is possible — new social and cultural forms of resistance,
or even exchange, find their “presencing” (Bhabha 1994). If the subaltern,
as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1985) maintains, cannot speak, she or he
can at least mimic the coloniser, ridicule and thus undermine the authoritarian substance and manner. To which the cynic might retort, or simply
confirm the coloniser’s view, that the colonial babu in his wheedling and
winking remains — well! — a babu.
In scintillating verbal display, which is far removed from communication with any subaltern, Bhabha suggests — some might say, imposes — his
own alternative totality: deferrals of ethical anchor, splits of signifier from
signified, and plays of difference — we are led to understand — will lead us
to a better world. If San Juan Jr is unambiguous in his commitment to political praxis, Bhabha is less than clear as to the connection between word
and deed. Yet, having said this, we recognise in Bhabha’s rhetoric of difference a check on forms of domination: a check on erasures of the local
archive within the ‘flow’ of globalisation. It is a flow that presents apparent
choice — ten brands of the same product with different labels — in the ‘noreal choice’ of what was referred to above as market convergence.
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Here is a conundrum. It is a conundrum that for the last decade or
more has characterised postdebate. Our investment in a common human
enterprise is qualified by our investment in the dignity of our different
selves. The conundrum, nonetheless, is more intractable when located in
the large categories of conflict-oriented or framework-oriented postcolonial
theory than when located in the experiential purchase of literary works, or
in the analysis of individual texts, or — dare one say it — in the aesthetic
appreciations of a literary turn.
It is widely agreed, for example, that a considerable output of the most
exciting contemporary literature emanates from non-metropolitan sources
of creativity and concern. Let me permit Salman Rushdie his colourful
response to George Steiner’s complaint that literary energy is being generated not in the metropolis, but at the edges of the world: “What does it matter...? What is this flat earth on which the good professor lives, with jaded
Romans at the centre and frightfully gifted Hottentots at the edges” (Rushdie
1996:1). We — that is, we in the academy, who have taken the post- challenge seriously — no longer think of Achebe or Gordimer or Coetzee as writing, in reaction, back to the centre. If we are willing to grant Achebe his initial project of re-inserting the African human being in the heart of darkness,
then his critical as well as his creative writing — are the two easily separable? — has offered telling adjustments to dominant perspectives on the
Western canon, in which the novelist has been always an artist before, as
recast by Achebe, a teacher (1988 [1965]). Is Conrad or Bunyan or
Shakespeare unifocally a metropolitan writer? Is the Third World writer
merely the doppelgänger of the metropolitan counterpart? We may wish to
read Toni Morrison as postcolonial, or J.M. Coetzee as both South African
and international, or — through his recent work (Coetzee 2005) — as
exploratory of the postcolonial as a settler-colony identification: Canberra,
or previously Cape Town, placed somewhere ‘in-between’ London and
Lagos.
As I have said, the focus in postcolonial literary studies has remained
attached to the elite work in new englishes by the emigré or multicultural
metropolitan author (the Salman Rushdie or the Zadie Smith). The oral or
indigenous voice, or popular expression on the periphery (African praises,
say, or Kenyan market literature), has had limited impact so far on postdebate, where the tendency has been to replace Western canons with
Third-World canons (instead of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, we have
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Achebe’s Things Fall Apart) or where the tendency has been to re-appraise
metropolitan ‘touchstones’ through the telescope of alternative modernities
(Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress in the New
World). Such ‘elite’ constrictions notwithstanding, a literary influence may
be fruitfully pursued. It is an influence that can be identified, more recently,
even in critics whose interest is principally philosophical, political or ideological.
Although he retains his Marxist predilection for class analysis in his
denigration of postmodern sceptics of truth, unity and progress, for example, Terry Eagleton in After Theory (2003) suggests a consideration of truth
categories — virtue, evil, morality, pleasure, death — which have been in
short supply in ideological critique, but which constitute the truth of poetry
as opposed to the truth of history (to invoke an Aristotelian distinction). For
Robert J.C. Young (2001: 409), to whom I have already referred, literary texts
— he names Passage to India, King Solomon’s Mines and Kim — are not an
expression of higher or more complex truth, but an aspect of discourse no
greater in import than the private letter as evidence in a law court as part of
legal discourse: discourse being not the direct or indirect representation or
misrepresentation of experience, but a system of statements, or rules, that
govern institutional practice. (In Young’s attention the practice, of course, is
colonialism.) Such a line of argument might seem unpropitious of a literary
turn; Young reminds us, nevertheless, that postcolonialism as a spur to
thought and activity predates Said, Bhabha and Spivak, the ‘holy trinity’ of
the northern university. Rather, the postcolonial has long had important
voices on the peripheries; that, in fact, peripheries may be an inappropriate
descriptive term, as perhaps is postcolonial itself, Young preferring tricontinental in its internationalist ambition. Not only was Gandhi an influential
presence — a kind of embodied creative text, to be interpreted in multiple
contexts of imaginative and ethical challenge — but it is significant that
what shaped those thinkers whose work is synonymous with postdebate
— Foucault and Derrida — was their experience in colonial Tunisia and
Algeria, respectively (see Young 2001: 317-334; 395-426).
Closer to a literary turn, Bart Moore-Gilbert (1997) — like Ato Quayson
(2000), another critic who has sustained a literary interest — distinguishes
between postcolonial theory and postcolonial practice, and includes as
formative influences not only philosophical and political thinkers, but also
the ‘first wave’ of Caribbean and African writer-critics of the decolonisation
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years. We are reminded that Achebe’s landmark essay, ‘An Image of Africa:
Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ (1988 [1975]), was published three
years prior to Said’s Orientalism; that Ngugi’s ‘decolonising the mind’ (1981)
— the phrase had been coined earlier by Es’kia Mphahlele (1962) in his
response Négritude — anticipated the agitation of Spivak, in particular, for
curricular reform; and that both E.K. Brathwaite’s theory of “creolisation”
(1971) and Wilson Harris’s neologism of “the in-between” (1967: 8) (a
means to figure a position between cultures) anticipated Bhabha’s conception of the Third Space. Harris well before Bhabha, in fact, had defined “the
void” as the element which, as in Bhabha, complicates full translation: the
void prevents cultures or cultural forms, which are being negotiated, from
attaining the easy commerce of equivalence or synthesis, Harris notes,
while at the same time the void — the apparent paradox is key to Bhabha’s
hybridity — is a place which allows cultures to mix not by erasing differences, but by “endorsing difference yet creatively undermining biases”
(Harris 1992: 20).
I mention the insights of so-called Third World literary figures not to
score ‘South’ points against the North, but to remind us that what we now
refer to as the postcolonial is, spatially and temporally, an entanglement of
the colony with modernity, in which — as Said (1993) has argued — no cultures are pure and in which the philosophical home may not be the nation
but the world. Not only in Bhabha or in Harris, but in observations dating
back to Roman and Christian encounters, we may identify — to return to my
earlier point — a post- conundrum: a narrative of causality suggesting both
progress (one stage to the next) and imposition (a dominating story); or a
local story susceptible, also, to its own paradoxes of difference, as both
identity-recognition and ethnicity-identification. It is a conundrum which, in
granting respect for ‘my story’, may trigger in ‘your story’ vicious regional
competition, as in the Balkan wars of the 1990s: why your story and not my
story? Or, whose story has authority? Or, according to post- ‘dissensus’, is
cultural understanding or literary history desirable, or even possible?
Given a rhetoric that is able to paralyse claims of rationality or ethical
choice, it is not really surprising to note impulsions to greater nuance and
complexity in either/or scenarios. The physical sciences, for example, point
out that as in scientific experimentation so in social life, we artificially construct our conjunctures of events. These hypothetical models chart causality according to provisional patterns while subjecting such patterns — which
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are, after all, constructed patterns — to ever more challenging observation
in the pursuit of truer or, at least more invariant, accounts of reality. (See
Potter and López 2001) Or, to turn to economics, Immanuel Wallerstein’s
world systems theory (1974; 1991) in its narration of modernity is not as singular as literary critics of Enlightenment tend to find convenient. While
attached to European and now U.S. global expansion, capitalism overlaps
differently, at different times and in different spaces, with the intrusions —
not simply the passivities — of decolonisation and neocolonialism. (It is not
a new observation that South Africa’s development invokes the consideration of colonialism of a special kind.)
Such tensions between global universalism — or a mélange of cultural production in U.S. sweatshops at the edges of the world — and the identity politics of regions, even nations, provoke several essays in the collection, Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Loomba et al 2005). The conclusion
of the editors, in their Introduction, is that in an era of globalisation debate
must move beyond the “conundrum” — consensus or dissensus — of the
past decade, and seek a “new critical language for articulating the linkage
between local, lived experience and the broadest structures of global economic and political power” (2005: 19). It is not, as Said suggests in what for
him is an unusual flourish to popular effect, that “stone-throwing Palestinian
youths or swaying dancing South African groups or wall-traversing East
Germans” (1993: 396) by their actions alone collapsed the relevant tyrannies. Rather, it is that metanarratives, as Kelwyn Sole (2005) argues in
Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, must not be erased, but must be qualified
by scrupulous attention to local conditions. Sole illustrates his point in an
analysis of the “quotidian experience” — the everyday, as a category — in
contemporary South African poetry, which questions the “pseudo freedoms” bred and licensed by neoliberalism in the new South Africa.
At the same time, Sole — alert to the danger of racial division — cannot contemplate a future progressive South Africa simply as an accumulation of discrete observations detached from the trace of a trajectory: a trajectory urging citizens towards a community of awareness. The concept,
community of awareness, is Fanon’s (1961): his synthesis beyond the
antithesis of native resistance. It is quoted approvingly by Said (1993: 262);
and it is endorsed by Young in his conclusion as to why, even though he
himself prefers the term tricontinental, postcolonialism retains its definitional purpose in globalised times. Postcolonialism marks the fact that, despite
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setbacks to decolonisation, human beings require a return to what has
come to be known as a radical humanitarian tradition. (See Fanon 1961:
315-316, and Young 2001: 67-68)
We touch again on the terrain of the literary, where explorations of the
subjective and imaginative life should seek the gradations that are too often
erased in the abstractions of postcolonial theory. Sole is unlikely to label
himself a postcolonial critic. His caution bears, perhaps, on Said’s observation (1993: 264) outside his flourish about stonethrowing youths and toyitoying (struggle-swaying) crowds: the postcolonial paradigm — the West’s
turning its gaze on its ex-colonies — is least applicable to the topographies,
both imaginative and developmental, of countries with particularly complicated relationships to a colonising/anti-colonising dialectic. Said’s examples
are Algeria, Guinea, sections of the Islamic and Arab worlds, and Palestine
and South Africa; and at the conference at Wits University (Johannesburg)
in 1996 on ‘Post-Colonial Shakespeares’ Jonathan Dollimore sought both
precariously and elegantly to tackle a certain hostility among South African
participants to a postcolonial discourse:
There was, for example, distrust of ‘metropolitan’ theory, including by
myself; a sense that this theory which gestured so much towards difference as a fundamental philosophical premise, disregarded its material
realities. But what struck me, as an outsider, as the most hostile divide of
all, was that between a materialist tradition of criticism and subsequent
developments conveniently (though again reductively) lumped together
as ‘the postmodern’ (1997: 259-260).
How to avoid the either/or dichotomy, or the divide — implicit in northern institutional postcolonialism, despite its best intentions — between a
still confident West as the framer of the discourse and the silent, or winking,
or rebellious native subjects of the South? As far as academic enquiry is
concerned, the response to the travelling theorist cannot be the indigene
who, in the blood and the bones, knows the local story, and Dollimore’s
conclusion, even as it feels compelled to retain the European thinker as
measure, shifts either/or to both/and:
I reconsider the place of pessimism within the political project in the spirit of Gramsci’s familiar yet never more apposite remark: ‘Pessimism of the
intellect, optimism of the will’ (1997: 260).
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Optimism of the will reinforces a literary turn, even if such a turn refuses to follow David Punter’s own imaginative, sometimes quirky attempt in
his study Postcolonial Imaginings (2000) to redirect postcolonial theory
towards the substance of his subtitle, “Fictions of a New World Order”.
Instead of postcolonial criticism’s “establishing a ground” — what are the
forms of colonialism, what is a comprador formation, etc.? — the question,
according to Punter, is how to respond to the pressures under which the
postcolonial experience is felt, how the narrative, recursive, struggling forward, burdened by setbacks, emerges in image, in speech, in the shocks of
its insights, in the complexity of its human interactions. It is an imagination
which Punter, in his attempt to turn to the literary, can identify only in
“melancholy, ruin, loss” (2000: 186): an imagination (defined by Punter as
postcolonial) of violent geographics, displacement, of ghosts in the history
house, in which the freight of centuries of colonisation can never be erased.
In the postcolony, however — if South Africa may be designated, tentatively, as a postcolony — the “spectral” (Punter 2002) does not necessarily negate the energies of renewal, even as the in-between space presents
an ongoing challenge. How then may the literary intervene? According to
Wilson Harris, “the possibility exists for the literary work to involve us in perspectives on renascence which can bring into play a figurative meaning
beyond an apparently real world or prison of history.... I believe a philosophy of history may well be buried in the arts of the imagination (1970: 8).
Or, more recently, according to Hanif Kureishi, “the only patriotism
possible is one that refuses the banality of taking either side, and continues
the arduous conversation. That is why we have literature, the theatre, newspapers — a culture...” (2005:19).
Both Harris and Kureishi would agree with Derek Attridge (2004: 126-131)
that literature defines its ‘singularity’ in its resistance to the all-encompassing
frame or idea; that literature although a cultural product is rarely
self-contained by the culture; and that whatever its effect or affect on our
experience, a literary turn is unlikely either to fast track into power any new
social movement or save our souls.
What literary culture might achieve is its own apprehension of otherness; its capacity to offer surprising articulations of, and insights into, the
complexity of human potential and conduct. Despite the utopian pronouncements of many postcolonial projects, we should heed Ania
Loomba’s more realistic purpose: we academics “should at the very least
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place our discussions of postcoloniality in the context of our own educational institutions and practices” (1998: 258). The objective is to stimulate
our students, and ourselves, to see afresh, and comparatively, across
worlds. In this, a literary turn may achieve an ethical dimension.
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Selection of Talks and Articles. Edited by H. Maes-Jelinek. Mundelstrup:
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“POSTCOLONIALISM” OR “POSTCOLONIALISMS”?: THE
DILEMMAS OF A TEACHER
PIA BRÎNZEU
University of Timiºoara
Abstract: The paper discusses the need to redefine “postcolonialism” in the
light of recent theoretical developments. If traditionally postcolonialism is seen
as what happens after a colony gains independence, the shifting nature of the
term “colony”, as well as the more recent direction of “Neo-” or
“Supercolonialism” imply a unification of divergent tendencies through
globalization and through the sustained effort to cope with the hybridity of nonWestern cultures and with the new threats of terrorism.
The present considerations on postcolonialism are the result of the
problems I encountered when I started a new course on Postcolonial
Voices: Races, Cultures, and Identities in Commonwealth Literatures. This
course, offered to the second-year students of English at the University of
Timiºoara, was part of a grant supported by the “New Europe College”, an
institute for advanced studies which encourages teachers in various
Romanian universities to introduce new courses at both under- and postgraduate levels.
A first discovery I made when inaugurating the course was that the
term “postcolonialism” resists all attempts to define it. It has become so
overlaid with accumulated meanings that it is almost impossible to avoid its
pitfalls and ambiguities. Interpretations, too numerous to be of any help,
lead to that kind of “shoulder-shrugging disenchantment” that Rushdie
(2002: 186) speaks about when referring to the Taj Mahal. The architectural
masterpiece is so often reproduced in images or objects that many travellers tend to avoid it when touring India. In literary and cultural theory,
however, we cannot shrug our shoulders with disenchantment, avoiding
the difficult terms that are used by theorists and critics. We have to fight with
definitions and to find a solution, especially when we find ourselves in the
demanding situation of giving a lecture to students.
22
The term “postcolonialism” in the singular also signals a reluctance to
give up the perspective of approaching the postcolonial world in terms of a
singular abstraction. Various books and articles, dealing with the postcolonial “condition”, “discourse”, “scene”, “Other”, “identity”, or “blackness”,
treat these terms as if they were single issues, common to such diverse
countries as Canada, Australia, Kenya, Fiji, and Jamaica. Only a few authors
resist the temptation of seeing postcolonialism as a singular and ahistorical
abstraction and prefer to use the term so as to denote multiplicity
(McClintock 1994, Chapman 1996).
The present paper aims, therefore, at enlarging the term “postcolonialism” towards its plural significations, using an academic framework, in
which the positions of teachers and students offer various perspectives,
depending on whether they are outsiders or insiders to a postcolonial context. Outsiders can offer only a speculative approach to Commonwealth
cultures and can articulate a merely theoretical background to the common
curricular subject of “postcolonialism” (in the singular), while insiders,
being familiar with the particular realities of their own country, can make
comparisons and think about the subject in terms of a multiplicity of “postcolonialisms”. The new tendencies of globalization, however, and mainly its
negative aspects generated by terrorism, mark a new direction in the
dialectics of the postcolonial countries, illustrating a more and more evident
tendency to form a homogenous and monolithic world in order to oppose
evil.
A well-known definition of postcolonialism is given in The Empire
Writes Back (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin 1989: 2), where the term “postcolonial” is considered to cover “all the cultures affected by the imperial process
from the moment of colonization to the present day”. The authors refer to
the entire colonial period, although “post” clearly indicates a chronological
posteriority to the colonized period. Even if we consider postcolonialism as
a post-independence historical period in once-colonised nations, the definition does not work, since Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were granted dominion status. Their relationship to the metropolitan centre was obviously different from that of Kenya, Nigeria or Uganda. Even in the case of the
latter category, the extent to which they can be considered postcolonial
countries is both variable and debatable (McClintock 1994).
Simon During (1993: 449) offers a broader definition of postcolonialism, including all nations or groups “which have been victims of imperial-
23
“POST”-DILEMMAS
ism” and which “need to achieve an identity uncontaminated by universalist or Eurocentric concepts and identities”. His definition excludes the
colonies of non-European countries (Korea colonized by Japan, East Timor
by Indonesia, Tibet by China) and does not solve the problem of writers
who are outsiders to a postcolonial country, but who are so much involved
with it that their contribution can no longer be ignored. Thus, although an
outsider to India, V. S. Naipaul, for instance, has paid so much attention to
this country both in his fictional representations and in his non-fiction that,
in the opinion of Salman Rushdie (2002: 170), no account of India’s modern literature would be complete without him.
John Lye (2007, available at: http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/
4F70/ postcol.html) sees postcolonial literature as a literature of “otherness”
and “resistance”, written out of the specific local experience. This definition
solves both the problem of relationship with Europe and that of colour, but
locates a specifically anti- or postcolonial discursive attitude of opposition,
one which begins as soon as the colonizing power inscribes itself onto the
body and space of its “others” and continues as an often occluded tradition
into the modern theatre of neo-colonialist international relations. In the
case of John Lye’s definition, problems are raised by white African writers,
such as J. M. Coetzee, who investigate the cruelty and complicity of
Apartheid from the African people’s position, and by white Englishmen —
William Boyd (Brazzaville Beach, 1995) or Giles Foden (Last King of
Scotland, 1999) —, writers who show more political sensitivity and empathy
to the Africans than usual outsiders. Are they to be considered postcolonial
writers or not?
If “hybridity, marginality, mimicry, and subalternity” are the basic elements in the definition of postcolonialism, as it appears in the dictionary
entry of the Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Literatures in English (Benson,
Conolly 1994, vol. 2: 1303), then a lot of major writers from former colonies
would be excluded, writers who write in their own language about local
experiences that do not necessarily deal with the postcolonial issues mentioned above. Ken Saro-Wiwa is a notable example in this respect.
Dawn Duncan (2002: 320-333 and 2007, available at:
http://www4.cord.edu/projects/Murphy/Postcolonial%20Theory/), develops
a three-point construct, based on ontological, contextual, and textual components. The ontological aspect is related to the postcolonial identity condition and shows different nations and writers fighting to come to some
24
understanding of identity; the contextual aspect refers to the socio-political
domination of a native people by any encroaching alien power, not necessarily a European one; the textual aspect deals with story telling, which has
at least three sides: the native history, the state construct, and the individual
investigation that interrogates the other two.
This approach results into a more suitable definition of postcolonialism
because it annihilates the major pitfalls of the previous ones and allows a
more detailed discussion of the major postcolonial issues. However, my
experience as a Romanian professor teaching postcolonialism to Romanian
students has brought me to the conclusion that the last approach can be
enriched with a fourth component, the teacher-audience relationship.
Disregarded by Duncan, the pedagogic context allows an in-depth exploration of the multiple imagological perspectives offered by teachers and students. Outsiders have a different perception of postcolonialism from insiders. While the former treat it without having had the experience of what colonization means, the latter can add a lot to the correct understanding of
their own identity constructs, nationness, degrees of “nativeness” and “foreignness”, etc. Collective and individual self-definition in postcolonial countries is part of a broader process in which not only economic, social, historical, and cultural forces interact, but also academic relationships produce a
range of identities, which may be taken up, rejected, opposed, or adapted
for individual or group needs. This is not the case with teachers for whom
postcolonialism remains a mere textual phenomenon.
In order to clarify the nuances arising when postcolonialism is placed
within a pedagogic framework, one has to resort to imagology, the science
which deals with the images and stereotypes that peoples have of a nation.
Traditionally, such images are differentiated into self-images, i.e., the perception of identity a nation has of itself, and hetero-images, i.e., the way in
which the nation sees others or is seen by them (Klineberg 1969: 225,
Spiering 1992: 18). This classification is, in my opinion, too simplistic,
because it leaves out the point of view of the exiles, i.e. the images of immigrants, who are initially outsiders in a community, but get partially integrated, and the images of emigrants, who were once insiders, but have more or
less lost contact with their native community. As shown elsewhere (Brînzeu
2000), the former are a special category of self-images, to be differentiated
as infra-images, while the latter should be included as alo-images within
the category of hetero-images. These points of view offer more shades of
25
“POST”-DILEMMAS
difference because they combine involvement with detachment and adapt
the images of otherness to suit self-images, completing the more frequent
stereotypes of the natives with a new set of attitudes brought from abroad.
Adapting the above-mentioned imagological concepts to the classroom context, four basic situations can be noticed. The first one is when
teachers and students belong to the colonized people and when, being both
insiders, discuss the problems as knowledgeable persons, who have developed similar self-images. It represents a good occasion for teachers to insist
on the identity, history, tradition, and cultural uniqueness of the former
dominion or colony, a process important in defining their identity and in getting students, as Homi Bhabha (1995: 5) says, to establish “acts of affiliation
and establishment”, to live moments of disavowal, displacement, exclusion,
and cultural contestation” or, as Edward Said (1994: 330) suggests, to name
“their basic requirements for democracy and for the right to an assured,
decently humane existence”.
In the second situation, when students are insiders, having developed
a self-image, and teachers are outsiders, having only a hetero-image, it is
obvious that an unequal status is created. The latter’s perspective is incomplete, deficient, and/or wrong, especially if it based on a specific
Eurocentric and logocentric historical legacy, according to which otherness
has been constructed as inferiority. A variant of the above situation is illustrated by Myrtle Hooper (1998: 24), a British teacher in South Africa, teaching a Zulu writer, Thomas Mofolo, and his novel Chaka to a Zulu audience.
She comments on her infra-image and on the sense she had of herself as
one of those “abazindlebe zikhanya ilanga” (people whose ears are translucent in the sun), i.e. one of the white colonizers who assassinate Chaka in
the end of novel. She voices her anguish: “Who am I? What am I doing
here? Do I belong? Why do I stay?...If my students know more about the subject of the text than I do, if the text defines me as oppressive Other, what am
I doing trying to teach it?” That Hooper is worried by the tension created
within the classroom represents a natural situation, since she is both an outsider and one of those who have contributed to an educational system
which “exiles the child, and while s/he learns to ‘master’ the other tongue,
and to live through the narratives and the stories of the imperial masters, the
feeling of homesickness — of severance from one’s own stories or one’s
‘real’ home — creates a radical split within the child’s psyche” (Azim 1993:
219).
26
The third situation may be that in which the teacher is an insider and
the students are not. Professor Michael Chapman illustrated the case when
he came to lecture about South African literatures to a Romanian audience.
Here, again, we have to be aware of different degrees of involvement: the
experience of the Romanians, for instance, whose historical past implies a
Turkish, Austro-Hungarian, and Soviet domination, is perhaps closer to the
teacher’s context than that of a non-colonized audience, but not as close as
that of African students who were colonized by the British. While the image
of, let us say, a Swiss audience is a hetero-image, the image of the
Romanians or Kenyans are alo-images, images of outsiders who have had
a certain experience of colonialism.
Finally, the last category is represented by teachers and students who
are both outsiders. Having been neither colonizers nor colonized, they create a hetero-image of the nations under discussion and approach the issues
from a merely theoretical perspective, without any direct knowledge of the
real postcolonial circumstances and patterns.
The above classification highlights the various orientations, discrepancies, contradictions or paradoxes appearing in the discourse of teachers
and students. Acceptance or abrogation, appropriation or refusal establish
relationships which underline a heterogeneous, often contradictory aspect
of “postcolonialism” and help teachers and students to avoid the danger of
not understanding the multiple nature of postcolonialism. If in lectures
about the literatures of Canada, South Africa, Australia, or any other
Commonwealth country, they deal with the common issues of imperial discourse, anti-colonial resistance, ethnic and/or hyphenated identity, the
devalued Other, whiteness versus blackness, the centre and the margin,
diaspora, and hybridity, teachers tend to have an integrating attitude and to
level things to a generally valid “postcolonialism” in the singular. Edward
Said (1994: 6) notices the phenomenon: “The British empire integrated and
fused things within it, and taken together it and other empires made the
world one.” William McNeill (1983: 260-61) also claims that as a result of
imperialism, “the world was united into a single interacting whole as never
before”. But teaching and theorizing postcolonialism should not aim at providing a totalising model for postcolonial texts and at homogenizing crucial
geo-political and cultural distinctions into invisibility. On the contrary, teachers should underline the plural, multiple dimension of postcolonialism,
since the efforts to create a coherent national culture in the act of narrative
27
“POST”-DILEMMAS
performance, the fight to obtain cultural autonomy, and the colonized
nation’s self-generation are all unique processes started after liberation.
Each colony fights in its own way with identity problems, with the overlap
and displacement of domains of difference, and with the intersubjective
and collective experience of nationness, community interest, or cultural values. Differences are articulated in concordance with social or minority
perspectives, with the on-going negotiations that seek to authorize cultural
hybridities, with the persistence and/or re-invention of tradition, the restaging of the past, and the consensual or conflictual engagements of cultural
difference. It is obvious that in this case we should speak of “postcolonialisms”, of the alternative aspects immediately recognizable when going
deeper into the study of a native culture. When comparing, for instance,
Michael Chapman’s Southern African Literatures (1996) and A. H. New’s A
History of Canadian Literature (2003), the different specificities of the two
countries become immediately obvious. South Africanness is to be understood in connection to the three characteristics highlighted by Chapman
(1996: 72, 173): that the European settlement consisted mainly in the forming of a new group of people on the African continent, the Afrikaners, who
would continue to regard themselves as European in racial hierarchies, but
who saw their home and destiny in Africa; that the white serious writers
struggle with their hesitations and retreats, involving questions regarding
their appurtenance to Africa or to Europe, in which collisions occur
between attachments to the great English or European culture and attempts
to establish indigenous convictions; and that South Africa is marked by the
Apartheid racial discrimination that lasted from the 1950s to the end of the
century. The troubled South African realities are dissimilar to the Canadian
context, marked by “Snow, North and Wilderness” (New 2003:2). Even a
single native culture, such as the Canadian one, is sufficiently varied in itself
to add a lot to the idea of postcolonial heterogeneity. A. H. New (2003:2)
comments:
Snow, North, Wilderness: these stereotypes of Canada suggest a fierce
uniformity — but even from earliest times, such generalizations have been
inaccurate. To read Canadian literature attentively is to realize how diverse
Canadian culture is — how marked by politics and religion, how influenced by differences of language and geography, how preoccupied
(apparently) by the empirical world, but how fascinated by the mysterious
and the uncertain. ‘Apparent’ is important: illusion is everywhere. For
28
repeatedly Canadian history has designed images of continuity and order,
which the social realities touch, but only sometimes reconfirm.
The differences underlined by the two authors, besides many other differences noticeable in the way in which the postcolonial nationness is articulated and in how community interests or cultural values are negotiated,
make postcolonialism appear in the last decades of the 20th century as a
space of transit, of territorial and ethnic hybridities, specificities, and multiplicities. The relation with the past makes colonized peoples be highly
diverse in their nature and in their traditions, so that while they may be the
‘other’ from the colonizers’ point of view, they are also different one from
another and from their own pasts, and should not be totalized or essentialized through such concepts as black consciousness, Indian soul, aboriginal
culture and so forth.
Facing the future, however, the reverse process becomes more and
more obvious. Due to globalization, we have entered a post-postcolonial
period, which can be seen as a time of transit, in which differences are levelled by the media, the information technologies, and the multinational corporations, such as the World Bank, the IMF, the UN, which express and exert
power on a global level. Globalization makes postcolonial countries be subject to similar patterns of production and consumption, to increased cultural influences, to new information systems linking the most disparate parts
of the planet. They standardize the most varied lifestyles, manners, and
mentalities, homogenize cultural and vestimentary items, make films and
books cross borders. The numerous examples of globalization in fiction can
be symbolically reduced to the little ditty sung by Gibreel Farishta, Salman
Rushdie’s hero in The Satanic Verses: “O, my shoes are Japanese/ These
trousers English, if you please/ On my head, red Russian hat — / My heart’s
Indian for all that” (1988: 5). Gibreel refers to the commercial circulation of
goods, but omits an important negative instance of globalization, of which
Salman Rushdie would become aware only after having published The
Satanic Verses: terrorism. Offensive, violatory, and rule-breaking, terrorism
is the manifestation of a primordial fascism, permanently surrounding us
and working mysteriously, without motivation and logic. The new axes of
terrorism, which have shaken the world in the last decades by throwing it
into a labyrinth of chaos, require new strategic alliances and contribute to a
new form of solidarity between postcolonial countries which would have
otherwise remained inimical. Symbolically, the beginnings of the new peri-
29
“POST”-DILEMMAS
od can be associated with the attack on the World Trade Centre, “a monstrous act of the imagination”, “an iconoclastic act”, sending “a message
that the modern world itself was the enemy, and would be destroyed. It may
seem unimaginable to us, but those who perpetrated this crime, the deaths
of many thousands of innocent people were a side issue. Murder was not
the point. The creation of a meaning was the point. The terrorists of
September 11, and the planners of that day’s events, behaved like perverted, but in another way brilliantly transgressive, performance artists:
hideously innovative, shockingly successful, using a low-tech attack to
strike at the very heart of our high-tech world” (Rushdie 2002: 436).
Unfortunately Rushdie is right, and so is Derrida’s (1976: 135) proposition
that “violence is writing”. This explains the fact that terrorism, even as
supreme negativity, inspires a lot of writers. Penelope Lively’s Cleopatra’s
Sister (1993), Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland (1998), Christopher
Wakling’s Beneath the Diamond Sky (2004), John Fullerton’s The Green
Land (2004), and, last but not least, Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men,
shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, are only a few examples of recent
“terrorism novels”, remarkable for their aesthetic potential. They illustrate
the fact that the postcolonial world has become united by a common concern to answer the major questions raised by terrorism: How can we
oppose evil? How are we going to live? What strategies should we to adopt?
What new responsibilities do we have as citizens of a world in which a new
kind of war, new enemies and new weapons appear? According to Talal
Asad (2007: 2), the creation of terror and its perpetuation, even on a literary
level, are aspects of a common militant action “in the unequal world we
inhabit”. We are all involved in understanding what is cruel and what is necessary, what should be justified or condemned in the particular acts of
death dealing. Thus, we should speak about “postcolonialism” in the singular again. It is no longer that the colonizers face the colonized in their fight
for supremacy, democracy, integration and the like. It is “us”, who are
against terrorism, and “they”, who stand for evil, irrespective of the country
they come from. Terrorism has interconnected the world in its common
fight against violence, discovering a different otherness and integrating the
colonial “devalued Other” into a new pattern of “sameness”, a framework
which absorbs all differences and contradictions. Both centre and margin
feel equally desirous to cooperate, to discover common strategies, to unite
30
in spite of former enmities against the horrors of terrorism. Teachers and
students should feel morally responsible and join them in the effort.
References
Asad, T. 2007. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ashcroft, B., G. Griffiths, H. Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back. London: Routledge.
Azim, F. 1993. The Colonial Rise of the Novel. London & New York: Routledge.
Benson, E and C.W. Conolly (eds.). 1994. Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Literatures in
English. London, New York: Routledge.
Bhabha, H. 1995. Nation and Narration. London, New York: Routledge.
Boyd, W. 1995. Brazzaville Beach, New York: Harper Collins.
Brînzeu, Pia. 2000. Corridors of Mirrors: The Spirit of Europe in Contemporary British
and Romanian Fiction. Lanham, New York, Oxford: University Press of
America.
Chapman, M. 1996. Southern African Literatures. London, New York: Longman.
Derrida, J. 1976. Of Grammatology. Transl. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore, London:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Duncan, Dawn. 2002. “A Flexible Foundation: Constructing a Postcolonial Dialogue”
in Relocating Postcolonialism. D. T. Goldberg and A. Quayson (eds.). Oxford,
UK: Blackwell.
Duncan, Dawn. 2007. Introduction to Postcolonial Theory. Available at:
http://www4.cord.edu/projects/Murphy/Postcolonial%20Theory
During, S. 1993. “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism Today” in Postmodernism. A
Reader. T. Docherty (ed.). New York, London, Toronto: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
pp. 448-462.
Foden, G. 1998. The Last King of Scotland. London: Faber and Faber.
Fullerton, J. 2005. This Green Land. London: Pan Books.
Hooper, M. 1998. “Reading Africa: Mofolo’s Chaka and the Reading of English”,
Current Writing, October, vol. 10 (2), pp. 19-37.
Klineberg O. 1969. “ Resources offertes par la psychologie expérimentale pour l’étude du caractere nationale”, Revue de Psychologie des Peuples, nr. 3, pp. 220229.
Lively, Penelope. 1993. Cleopatra’s Sister . New York: Harper Perennial
Lye, J. 2007. Some Issues in Postcolonial Theory. Available at: http://www.brocku.ca/
english/courses/4F70/postcol.html
Matar, H. 2006. In the Country of Men. London: Viking.
McClintock, A. 1994. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Postcolonialism” in
Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. P. Williams, L. Chrisman (eds.).
New York, London, Toronto: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 291-304.
McNeill, W. 1983. The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Forces and Society Since
1000 A.D. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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New, A. H. 2003. A History of Canadian Literature. Montreal & Kingston, London,
Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Rushdie, S. 1988. The Satanic Verses. London: Viking.
2002. Step Across This Line. Colleceted Non-fiction 1992-2002. London:
Vintage.
Said, E. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage.
Spiering, M. 1992. Englishness, Foreignness and Images of National Identity in
Postwar Literature. Amsterdam, Atlanta GA.: Rodopi.
Wakling, C. 2004. Beneath the Diamond Sky. London: Picador.
POSTMODERNISM AND/ AS POSTCOLONIALISM:
ON RE-READING MILAN KUNDERA AND BREYTEN
BREYTENBACH
ILEANA SORA DIMITRIU
University of Kwa-Zulu-Natal Durban
Abstract: This paper compares Kundera and Breytenbach, two writers who
address conditions of social oppression and reveal similarities of ‘double
vision’ concerning what is home, what is exile. Both have been classified as
postmodern, but this analysis argues that their writing modality is an
expression of ‘postmodernism-as-postcolonialism’ (Quayson 2000). The
present reading resists any easy separation of the two ‘posts’ of our time, and
offers a model of interpretation that, by analogy, may be applied to several
writers whose postmodernist art emanates from a historical burden.
The two ‘posts’ of our times (postmodernism and postcolonialism)
have tended to be placed as oppositional categories of sense-making. This
paper suggests that, in the times in which we live — specifically to my purpose here, after the Cold War, after Apartheid —, the separation of postmodernism and postcolonialism is a simplification of a necessary ‘double vision’
in which, amid new global mobilities, positions of home and exile, for
example, intersect in both the economic and aesthetic life.
My point will be illustrated in a ‘post-reading’ (which involves both
postmodern and postcolonial reading practices) of two writers who have
been difficult to classify as occupying either one of the ‘posts’: Milan
Kundera and Breyten Breytenbach, the former from the ex-Czechoslovakia,
the latter from South Africa, two countries which in different ways may be
said to have suffered the impositions of totalitarian systems, whether ideology- or race-based, whether Stalinism or Apartheid. So far, there have been
two main lines of critical approach to these two writers: one approach has
tended to see them mainly as voices of protest, the other continues to focus
on their aesthetic achievements, analysing the array of recognisably postmodernist tactics of fictional experimentation.
34
My attempt of seeking a more inclusive approach, one more appropriate to the post-1990 moment, has been anticipated by various critics — e.g.
Hutcheon 1988; Boehmer 1995; Connor 1997; Quayson 2000; Appiah 2006.
Such attempts have sought to establish paradigmatic affinities between
marginality and difference, and hence to investigate not separate categories
of sense-making, but the ‘double vision’ of complex responsiveness to cultural practices. Both ‘posts’ are continuations of poststructuralist rethinking
of the relationship between sign and referent, and both express their antisystemic drive through insistence on pluralism and borders, and through
incredulity towards meta-narratives. Both — in their critique of totality —
elevate the plurality of the atomised fragment and of the peripheral locality
to prominence, thus foregrounding the uneven forces of cultural representations and their contestation of any central social authority. Artistic strategies such as indeterminacy, ambiguity, deferral and fragmentation are
meant to encourage multiple points of entry to cultural phenomena. In fact,
it is precisely “the question of double vision [which] a peripheral existence
in the world engenders” (Quayson 2000: 141) that is the major common
denominator between the two. But then, of course, questions regarding
exactly whose point of view is being represented spring to mind. Ironically,
then, it is in the most obvious similarity that the most glaring dissimilarity is
located. To be more exact, although exercising a double vision by taking
into account the existence of multiple peripheries, postmodern thought still
tends to “reference a particular socio-cultural configuration ... from the vantage point of the western metropolis” (Quayson 2000: 140), while postcolonial thought tends to analyse global phenomena from the specific material
contexts of countless peripheries.
While postmodernism is, in the first instance, an a-political reaction to
the over-inflation of western rationality and its proliferation of representations, postcolonialism is primarily focused on the politics of representation,
on restoring the marginalised to radical emancipation. As Gaylard puts it,
“postcolonialism may offer postmodernism and postmodernity a moment
of undecidability that enables, indeed forces agency, rather than destroying
it in a morass of relativism” (2005: 52).
In sum, while not ignoring postmodernism’s anti-totalising impulse
and its celebration of hybridity and syncretism, postcolonialism also has a
strong positionality (a “geo-political edge” Gaylard 2005: 36). Its hybridity is
not a-historical, its distorted world is not only incredibly fissured, but fis-
35
“POST”-DILEMMAS
sured by grim material reality, the material reality of Third World social and
economic slippage and disintegration. Referred to by some as “Third World
postmodernism” (Gaylard 2005) — and by others as “postmodernism of
resistance” (Cornis-Pope 2004), or “postcolonialising postmodernism”
(Quayson 2000), or “interstitial/ liminal postcoloniality” (Jeyifo 1990), or
“localised cosmopolitanism” (Appiah 2006) — this inclusive brand of postcolonial project goes beyond both new orthodoxies of our times: that of
western/ international postmodernism and that of context-based postcolonialism. It is a project that blends experimentation with social engagement,
whose ‘self’ is both profoundly alienated and deeply anchored, in an
attempt at reconciling cosmopolitanism with emancipated nationalism.
Offering a postcolonial perspective on the contemporary postmodern condition helps generate a more nuanced understanding of the grammar of
postmodernity. As Quayson says: “postmodernism can never fully explain
the state of the contemporary world without first becoming postcolonial,
and vice versa” (2000:154).
In the light of these considerations, I shall offer a comparative ‘interstitial’ reading of two controversial novels: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable
Lightness of Being (1995; 1984) and Breyten Breytenbach’s Memory of Snow
and of Dust (1989). Both novels suggest the postmodern becoming postcolonial, and vice versa: the ‘double vision of home and exile’, of belonging
and migrancy. Although neither would wish to be classified as post-anything, an exploration of intersecting ‘posts’ provides a challenging approach
to their writings and, by extension, to something of the complex relationship
of fictional and material universes that are pertinent to the world today. Both
Kundera and Breytenbach have had first-hand experience of violent societies, and as dissident writers they responded to totalitarian over-determination — ideological/ Stalinism and racist/ Apartheid, respectively. At the
same time, both have used recognisably postmodernist artistic techniques
of experimentation. Such classifications, as I have suggested above, have to
be qualified in relation to a postcolonial political drive.
Despite the political pressures of Eastern Europe, Kundera is routinely
considered to be a major representative of international postmodernism,
and more seldom as a dissident challenging a by now defunct regime. My
contention is that neither of these clear-cut classifications does justice to
Kundera’s artistry or political vision. Attitudes towards classifying
36
Breytenbach are also divergent, with critics positioned in various ‘laagers’,
some praising his aesthetic achievements, while others debating the
divorce between writer and person, judging the person’s political activism
as reductionist intoxication.
It was in fact the totalitarian pressure of their home countries — the exCzechoslovakia and South Africa — that was responsible for a writer-person/ art-politics split in the reception of both writers. The political contexts
prompted each to live outside the country of his birth. Both moved to Paris,
a city which seemed to offer a space free of the emotions of ideological
constriction. Both Kundera and Breytenbach have become migrant writers
and cultural pioneers, “real explorers and frontierspeople of the abyss”
(Okri 1997: 39). Their travelling cosmopolitanism may be defined as an act
of radical emancipation: an anti-systemic impulse giving a voice to the
many ‘voiceless’ people who experience dislocation. For Bhabha too,
migrants represent a new kind of political stance: “it is by living on the borderline of history ... that we are in a position to translate the differences ...
into a kind of solidarity” (Bhabha 1994: 170).
Such a stance draws on a “double perspective” (Rushdie 1991:12) or
“double vision” (Quayson 2000: 141) which allows home (as conceptual
locus) to be experienced from both inside and outside an exilic condition.
Writers-in-exile embody the postcolonial trope of displacement and
migrancy, and, paradoxically, it is in migrancy that one can find links
between postcolonial and postmodern thought — the common denominator being the ‘double vision’ of focusing simultaneously on centre and
periphery. My investigation of double vision in Kundera and Breytenbach
entails a degree of perspectival alienation: I shall be looking at each one of
the two novels mentioned above as alienated from normal grids of interpretation, while I follow Quayson’s suggestion of “attempting to alienate
images, tropes and texts from themselves by reading them against others
that do not seem to share historical similarities.” (2000: 154). Or as Loomba
puts it, “while we cannot gloss over the real differences between our various locations ... it is equally important to forge links between the differently
positioned subjects” [on the world scene] (2005:14). Such will be my
approach to the two novels to be discussed .
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1995 [1985]) has been subject to
various readings. Some have read this novel as a love story between a
37
“POST”-DILEMMAS
young and ambitious Czech doctor, Tomas, and his naïve admirer, Tereza.
Their love story is shown to have survived difficulties, such as the Russian
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the self-exile of the two in France and
their subsequent return home. Other critics have focused on political implications, seeing the novel as a fictional account of the Russian invasion.
According to such a reading, Kundera expresses “a humour capable of seeing history as grotesque” (McEwan in Bradbury 1990: 211), as for example,
when he reflects on the persecution of intellectuals in a dictatorial workers’
state: Tomas has to resign as a surgeon and become a window-cleaner, as
retribution for having written an anti-communist tract. Yet another perspective sees the novel as a treatise on the existential concepts of ‘lightness’ and
‘weight’: “The heavier the burden ... the more real and truthful [our lives].
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than
air ... his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we
choose?” (Kundera 1995: 4-5). Kundera returns to this question throughout
the novel: he uses the dichotomy of heaviness/ lightness as an important
trope and organising device for his investigation of human nature and relationships, to echo Kafka, in “the trap that the world has become” (McEwan
in Bradbury 1990: 220), a trap in which the individual is caught in binaries of
private/ public, truth /lie, the West/ East European divide.
From a postmodernist perspective, however, Kundera’s mastery lies in
his taking his readers on a journey of transforming binaries and, in the
process, exploring the slippery in-betweens. This is most obviously manifest
in the development of the two main characters: Tereza and Tomas. At the
beginning, they are placed at opposite ends of the spectrum. Tereza is a
marker of weight: she is mentally entrapped in an over-dependent relationship with a philandering husband. Yet, Tereza gradually learns how to
become more existentially light-footed in acts that may seem frivolous, yet
for Tereza represent a maturing process, a counter-balancing act to her earlier ‘unbearable heaviness of being.’ Tomas, on the other hand, moves in
the opposite direction, from ‘unbearable lightness’ to meaningful heaviness
of being. At the beginning, he is presented as a notorious womaniser
searching for the “millionth particle of difference” between his many conquests (1995: 11). But heaviness increasingly invades his life: he loses his
job and becomes a “déclassé intellectual” (226), being forced to join the
disenfranchised lumpen proletariat. At the end of the novel, the couple get
killed in an accident; they literally die crushed under the weight of a truck.
38
Tereza’s ‘unbearable heaviness of being’ merges with Tomas’s ‘unbearable
lightness of being’, a process that happens via insistent reversals in the contact zones between the two.
Kundera does not pursue his lightness vs heaviness existential riddle in
the mode of individual/ vertical introspection, but rather according to the
rules of what Deleuze and Guatarri (1972) call “rhizomes” — the invisible,
horizontal network of filiative connections and mental internalisations.
Kundera produces capillary-like linkages of incidents and characters who
explore their identity disjunctively, in the mirror of the other’s difference
from self. The heaviness/ lightness equation, for example, is pursued in a
related fashion in the section, “Words Misunderstood,” in which the reader
is presented with a key-word digest of another pairing in the novel: that of
Sabina (a Czech who lives in exile) and Franz, her married Swiss lover.
Here, Kundera introduces an exercise in intercultural translation, while suggesting that there are no conceptual universals, and that the replicas of such
absent originals can only be simulacra. All one can do is navigate in a world
of irreconcilable differences that are arbitrarily juxtaposed on the pages of
a dictionary, a dictionary of ‘words misunderstood’. To give an example of
such dictionary entries: ‘truth/ lies’; while for Sabina, living in truth with her
married lover, Franz, “was possible only away from the public” eye (109),
Franz “was certain that the division of life into private and public spheres is
the source of all lies” (109). Not surprisingly, therefore — given these and
many other ‘words misunderstood’ between them — the affair ends the
moment Franz brings it out into the light, which makes Sabina feel a profound loss of intimacy, for now “they failed to hear the semantic susurrus of
the river flowing through the words exchanged” (84). One lover’s unbearable heaviness is the other’s unbearable lightness. The search for a common narrative proves to be futile: there are no stable centres in life or fiction, but only isolated dictionary entries.
The above suggests a postmodernist reading of the novel, a reading
that focuses on both aesthetic and philosophical incertitude (see Brink’s
essay on Kundera’s novel, 1998). We need to keep in mind, however, that
the characters play out their destinies in an over-determined socio-political
context, i.e., in a country under (Soviet) occupation. So, is a postcolonial
reading of the novel — ‘the postcolony’ weighted with the political determinant — also possible? Yes, provided one redefines postcolonialism beyond,
to quote Young, its “tri-continental” (2001) application of Africa, Latin
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
America and Asia. Rather, we must include Eastern Europe which, although
not affected by race-based colonialism, was ideologically colonised/ militarily occupied for nearly half a century. As Quayson says: “a postcolonial project has to be alert to imbalances and injustices wherever these may be
found, in East and West, North and South ...” (2000: 11).
To reiterate, Quayson’s concept of the ‘postcolonialising’ discourse —
the willingness to look at global phenomena through the prism of postcolonial theory — does not exclude a dialogue with postmodernism. A useful
working description of such an intersection is Jeyifo’s ‘interstitial’ postcolonialism (1990), as opposed to Achebe’s ‘normative’ postcolonialism of the
“novelist as teacher” (1988: 27-31) . The former “embraces what is normally perceived in the West as a metropolitan or hybrid sensibility [that] is neither securely and snugly metropolitan, nor assertively or combatively ThirdWorldist” (Jeyifo 1990: 53). Writers like Rushdie, Walcott, Marechera,
Soyinka, Marques, Allende and also Coetzee, alongside Kundera and
Breytenbach, could all be referred to as ‘interstitial or liminal postcolonial’
writers. Their double vision/ consciousness is a marker of three inter-related conditions: the postcolonial in its political imperative; the postmodern as
resistant to master narratives; and the migrant state of being as permanent
impermanence. The writers I have just mentioned all inhabit such inbetween mental and geographical locations.
According to such a perspectival and terminological shift, Kundera
offers postcolonial insights, albeit — as in East European criticism — presented through the grammar of the postmodern. In short, prominent critics
in the East European region do not make much use of postcolonial language, or indeed theory, preferring instead the notion of an ‘East European
postmodernism of resistance’, which highlights resistance to the Soviet dictatorship. This suggests that West and East European postmodernisms are
not identical, the ‘eastern’ version presenting itself as “an aesthetic-ideological modality of surpassing aberrant political conditions ... with the state as
‘author’, its ideology as ‘master-narrative’, and its citizens as silenced
‘peripheries’ ” (Cornis-Pope 2004: 45). It is interesting to note, however, that
even though preoccupied with the socio-economic and political dimensions of the postmodern condition, the ‘postmodernists of resistance’
(Jameson or Harvey, for example) have omitted the East European paradigm from their conversations. Or have they allowed it conveniently to dis-
40
appear behind the Iron Curtain as an embarrassment to the Marxist inflections of their particular theorising?
To return to Kundera’s preoccupation with heaviness/ lightness — we
may introduce a heavier context to the postmodernist interpretations
offered in the first half of this paper. What is unbearably light in Kundera’s
fictional universe? It is not only the slipperiness of boundaries or styles of
representation; what is unbearable is also the farcical simulacrum of normality under communist dictatorship. The term ‘simulacrum’ is reminiscent
of Baudrillard’s definition of the term (1983: 170), as well as of Jameson’s
insistence on “depthlessness” in a culture of the image, “the identical copy
for which no original has ever existed” (1991: 6, 18). Although it has become
axiomatic, at least since Jameson, that postmodernism be conceived
through the prism of (western) late capitalism, East European critical
approaches have found that postmodern features can also describe stateorchestrated ‘late socialism’: “The totalising nature of the simulacrum …
meant that it could manufacture itself — not just in cultural or interpretive
— but also in economic terms [whereby] the Soviet system replaced economy with a spectacle of economy insofar as it tried to administer the economy through the power of ideology” (Annus and Hughes 2004: 58, 60).
Not surprisingly, therefore, the ‘late socialist simulacrum of commodity’ imploded in 1989, when — in a domino effect — the economies of
Eastern Europe collapsed. Although Kundera does not actually use the term
simulacrum, he alludes to its salient features, which are ‘unbearable lightness’ and ‘unbearable kitsch.’ The ‘late socialist simulacrum’ is presented
as the great historical kitsch of the twentieth century. In the section titled,
“The Grand March,” for example, Kundera defines kitsch as a grand march
of conformism, a sanitised rejection of real life. Starting with a stark meditation on “shit” as necessarily part of life, Kundera says provocatively that
“either man was created in God’s image — and God has intestines! — or
God lacks intestines and man is not like him” (1995: 239), in which case
“human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light”
(238). He then proceeds to give a definition of kitsch as “the absolute denial
of shit [for] kitsch excludes everything which is essentially unacceptable in
human existence” (242). While such comments can be considered to echo
postmodernist irreverence in their juxtaposition of unexpected levels of
reality (God and intestines), we are aware that in this novel Kundera reflects
on the politically kitschy ideal of enforced consensus in a totalitarian
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
regime: “Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find
ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch … what I mean is that everything
that infringes on kitsch must be banished from life: every display of individualism ...every doubt, all irony ... In this light, we can regard the gulag as a
septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse” (245-46).
Kundera pursues his investigations of the various incarnations of political kitsch — from the vantage point of the migrant’s ‘double vision’ — via
his two above-mentioned characters: the Swiss, Franz, and the Czech,
Sabina, the latter living in self-exile in Franz’s country. The two differ greatly as to their perceptions of the political realities in the East and West. For
Franz, presented as the typical western Marxist of the 60s and 70s, Sabina’s
attractiveness is strongly linked to the aura of her old country with its evocations of pain and political persecution: “Superimposing the painful drama
of her country on her person, he found her even more beautiful” (98).
Subconsciously, Franz is kitschify-ing Sabina and the real pain of her country, whereas for Sabina: “[t]he only word that evoked in her a sweet nostalgic memory of her homeland was ‘cemetery’ … For Franz, [on the other
hand], a cemetery was an ugly dump of stones and bones” (100). It was as
uncomfortable as non-kitsch: “as soon as kitsch is recognised for the simulacrum that it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its
authoritarian power and becoming as touching [and heavy] as any other
human weakness” (249). When spending time in cemeteries, therefore,
Sabina was actually trying “to escape the kitsch [and melodrama] that people wanted to make of her life” (248), the unbearable lightness of being .
Kundera’s anti-kitsch stance could be interpreted as an anti-essentialist challenge to meta-narratives that force individuals into “the categorical
agreement” with [the status quo] (250). The title of the chapter, “The Grand
March”, is used ironically. Progressive ideas can easily become ossified, as
metaphorically represented in the May Day parade in Sabina’s country, “a
parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison” (97). Kundera is particularly vehement in his attack on the
Grand March of the Left, whether the corrupt one in the East or the naïve
one in the West. Again, the ‘double vision’ of his being an émigré in France
allows him to position himself in the in-between space and destabilise
many comfort zones on both sides of the spectrum. His attacks on western
Marxism — which he came to know intimately while in exile in France —
are as fierce as his attacks on its East European counterpart. His attack on
42
the former is personified in the figure of the naïve Franz, who cannot accept
that the Communist meta-narrative has failed. Franz, like many other western idealists, is shown to have been unable to understand that “neither [the
kitsch of] frozen time nor the illusion of absolute space behind the Iron
Curtain could deliver salvation” (Krasztev in Cornis-Pope 2004: 73). In his
desperate need to believe in the ‘grand utopia’, Franz follows many prominent intellectuals of the Left to Cambodia, in what proves to be a futile
protest march of misguided idealism: “When the crimes of the country
called the Soviet Union became too scandalous, a leftist had two choices:
either to spit on his former life and stop marching, or to reclassify the Soviet
Union as an obstacle to the Grand March, and march on ... But because
what makes a leftist a leftist is the kitsch of the Grand March ... it is impossible to shout ‘Down with Communism!” (254). Even as he remains faithful
to his own kitsch, Franz pays for this fatal attraction by way of a futile death:
he is robbed and killed by a Cambodian Communist!
The other two main characters, Tomas and Tereza, are also made to
exit the stage. Kundera removes them from the flux of city events to the
social timelessness of the Czech countryside, where the peasants — whose
land had been nationalised — have become pauperised and deracinated:
“The country offered them nothing [but generalised apathy] ... a farmer
who no longer owns his land ... has nothing to lose, nothing to fear” (274).
Living a simulacrum of freedom and autonomy also means living in the
everlasting present. As Annus and Hughes have pointed out, Jameson’s
insights regarding the disappearance of a collective sense of history also
holds true for the ‘cultural logic of late socialism’: “The Soviet order was
experienced, by most people, as a boundless, everlasting curse, a present
with no way out” (in Cornis-Pope 2004: 59). This then, in the form of the
remote village, is where Kundera dumps Tomas and Tereza. Is their sense
of uprootedness and exhaustion a postmodernist, a postcolonial, or an EastEuropean postmodernist anti-Paradise?
Kundera ends his novel with a sense of ‘arrested time’ in the aftermath
of the 1968 Prague Spring. The atmosphere of timeless space and its accompanying affectless exhaustion is masterfully presented in the last chapter.
Kundera’s anti-Paradise is eventually “man’s longing not to be man” (288).
Shifting the gaze from people to animals (the couple’s dog) implies a
painful absence of human desire, with Tomas himself becoming a helpless
rabbit in one of Tereza’s dreams. Although “Tereza and Tomas had died
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
under the sign of weight” (265), being literally crushed under the weight of
a truck, Kundera actually lets them dissolve into social non-being, in the village where time stands still; he allows them to lose their individuality and
become “free of all missions” (305). What I am trying to suggest here is that
the ‘lightness’ of their social existence-cum-annihilation is ‘unbearable’
because it ends as a simulacrum of normality. But, paradoxically, a simulacrum not detached from the material effects of a totalitarian regime.
In offering an interstitial reading of a major postmodernist writer, I
hope to have suggested a template for the analysis of other writers who
cross the boundary between the postmodern and the postcolonial as, for
example, the South African novelist, Breyten Breytenbach, who — like
Kundera — does not reside in any single category of understanding. He
could also be referred to as an ‘interstitial’ or ‘liminal postcolonial’ writer
and/ or a ‘postmodernist of resistance’.
Like Kundera, Breytenbach can be found as both claiming and disavowing affiliation to any locality, while journeys between existential ‘lightness’ and ‘heaviness’ are also this writer’s concern. Memory of Snow and of
Dust (1989), for instance, is written from the vantage point of the migrant’s
double vision that focuses on ‘home and exile’ not as fixed entities, but as
processes in endless metamorphosis. As a writer in exile, Breytenbach is
preoccupied with defining his self and displays what Said refers to as the
“metaphysical” condition of the intellectual, that sense of “constantly being
unsettled, and unsettling others” (1994: 39).
From one perspective, Memory is a good postmodernist illustration of
its author’s inner journey across worlds, during which he attempts to make
sense of his nomadic self, his “collection of impressions, sentiments and
afterthoughts”, as he says (1989: 74). Breytenbach has developed his own
theory of life in exile, his own ‘nomadology’, or Middle World, which is situated somewhere “between East and West, North and South” (1996: 4), and
which is inhabited by culturally hybrid beings, who are both citizens and
“un-citizens” everywhere (1996: 3). As he has said elsewhere, nomads are
also translators of self: “When you are in exile, you will always be a translated version of yourself: it is you sensing yourself as an exile, but it is also
others looking at you as an exile. There will be translations of normality. You
become your own Other” (Dimitriu 1996: 98).
44
The protagonist, Mano, a South African of mixed race — become “a
stateless unemployed marginal, a shifter” (1989: 6) — is also a nomadic
being, an invisible translator of his own self: “a situation of view, a transit
point, an impersonation, better still, a translation” (24), a man whose
“memory is amputated, the stump of whose tongue is bleeding ... sucking
and masticating the stale bread of exile, and taking refuge there as in a
home away from home” (61). However, he is not alone in his exile, but
shares his new status with Meheret, an Ethiopian journalist, another exile.
The couple are often presented in conversation on issues of exile and
home, centre and margin, “their exile being the living proof that death doesn’t kill” (25).
In postmodernist or self-referring vein, Breytenbach, via the character
of the ghost writer, Barnum, reveals the plot of the novel, Memory of Snow
and of Dust. At the same time, the postcolonial intrudes: the story of love
and betrayal is set in politically over-determined times. Mano, the restless
exile, “is bleeding of a distant and ancient wound, Azania” (87). He will have
to leave Meheret: “he will have to slip away into the water, for an exile lives
abroad as a moon does in a lake” (23). Mano will be sent to South Africa —
“the dog with bloody sores” (63) — by a secret and powerful organisation.
This is the end of Part One, which is mainly Meheret’s récit, tellingly titled
“Utérotopia”, a semantic contact zone of hybridity, for “it contains in it both
‘Europe’ and ‘Ethiopia’ [Meheret’s home country], ‘uterus’ [suggestive of
her lonely pregnancy] , all of which can perhaps be understood as pointing
towards a world beyond ‘heterotopia’” (Coullie and Jacobs 2004: 167). The
section “Utérotopia” is a good example of Breytenbach’s mastery of postmodernist heterogeneity and polyphonic discourse. The various discourses
include musings on fictional experimentation, as seen from the vantage
point of home-in-exile.
So, is the description of this hybrid anti-narrative also postcolonial? As
pointed out in relation to Kundera, it is the material heaviness of the locality, its “geo-political edge” (Gaylard 2005: 36), that identifies the postcolonial,
and also the profound sense of a momentous historical configuration about
to be born. From a postcolonial perspective, the focus will be on the
migrant’s desperate sense of impotence vis-à-vis his native margin, which
remains a faraway place in dire need of change. The margin is South Africa
in the 1980s — during the State of Emergency — both Mano’s and Barnum’s
home country. As a man of mixed race, Mano finds South Africa to be a
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
heartland of spiritual exile, “that horrible country in his mind … a geography
of absence”(6), a place of contrasts: “that ungodly mixture of revolution and
repression and mysticism and cynicism” (59). Through this character,
Breytenbach’s love/ hate relationship with the country he has left behind is
insistent and takes on a multitude of other metaphorical forms of expression. Breytenbach envisages escaping the perverse power game of
apartheid via cultural hybridisation, or what he also repeatedly refers to as
‘bastardisation’: “Our bastardisation was our most potent antidote to
apartheid. In fact, one could say that apartheid was the horrible fever
accompanying the slow forging of a new identity culture ... We are awareness rubbed raw, and we try exactly to supersede the iniquity of the system
and its dogma, and its dogs, by our expanded cultural awareness” (163).
Mano, in exile, becomes even more aware of his otherness and feels
an urge to leave Europe, for he perceives the centre’s simulacrum of home
as increasingly unbearable in its ‘lightness’: “The centres have become too
self-absorbed, harried, imploding to madness and soot and broken bottles.
Edges are more authentic” (24; my emphases). Carrying forged documents,
Mano is taken for white, and arrested for a crime he did not commit. Like
Tomas and Tereza, who leave behind them France and the bustle of urban
living to settle and then die in a remote East European village, where time
stands still — an expression of affectless exhaustion — Mano returns to
apartheid South Africa from Paris, only to land in a prison of arrested time,
a labyrinth of death and dying. And just as Tomas and Tereza die in an accident under the sign of weight, under the belly of a truck, so Mano dies, also
by accident, being sentenced for a crime he did not commit. Both Kundera
and Breytenbach take their protagonists from the centre (the heart of
Europe) back to their native peripheries, where — like many other returning migrants everywhere — they are unable to reconnect to their roots.
Such comparisons, I reiterate, are illustrations of Quayson’s idea that in a
postcolonial project, it is important to “perceive cognate or parallel realities
within seemingly disparate contexts” (2000: 10).
Breytenbach’s No Man’s Land — the prison house, but also the larger
prison house that was South Africa under apartheid — has the mental structure of a labyrinth, which ironically bears all the marks of the Kafka-esque
universe described by Deleuze and Guatarri as a “a machinic assemblage
of desire” that has the power “to make men and women to be part of the
machine” (1986:82). Kundera, in his Art of the Novel (1988), has also point-
46
ed out that in Kafka’s world people live in a “boundless labyrinthine institution they cannot escape and cannot understand [for] the institution is a
mechanism that obeys its own laws” (1988: 101). Having become unintelligible, the Kafka-esque institution acquires the features of a penal establishment, where instead of “the offense seeking its punishment … the logic is
reversed. The person punished does not know the reason for the punishment ... and needs to find a justification for his penalty: the punishment
seeks the offense” (103). Having been arrested and sentenced to death, as
I have indicated, for a crime he did not commit, Mano, while in prison, desperately seeks to understand the internal structure of No Man’s Land, “the
place … between nothing and nowhere” (280). Much like in his attempts at
fictionally coming to terms with his own incarceration as a political prisoner in his autobiography, Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984),
Breytenbach here invests Mano with the dignity of searching for the meaning of the trap his life has become.
Breytenbach suggests that the labyrinth should not be understood
metaphorically, but rather as a process of ‘metamorphosis’ or ‘becoming’ —
thus, once more echoing Deleuze and Guatarri’s insights into the Kafkaesque universe where “there is no longer any figurative sense, but only ... a
circuit of states that forms a mutual becoming” (1986: 22); ‘becoming’ or
the ‘art of walking’ one’s way around the maze, as Breytenbach puts it.
Walking through the labyrinth is likened to poststructuralist interpretations
of fact and fiction: “You play the Game, are played by it … exactly for the
sake of Structure” (251).
Even in this prison space with its “simulacrum of inherent structure”
(213), Breytenbach suggests the need for investigative agency and action.
The whole of Part Two is, in fact, an exercise in “the noble art” of translating the hostile prison environment into a place of inner growth. Thus, Mano
continues his process of “editing his long walk to nowhere” (223) and finds
out more and more that, although “it is not possible to walk away from
prison … you are free because you have interiorised death” (258), having
developed “the faculty of letting go of the self in a specific environment”
(273).
As in the Kafka-esque tradition — which Breytenbach shares with
Kundera — and as Camus said about Kafka, “the absurd is recognised,
accepted … and from then on we know that it has ceased to be the absurd
… [thus becoming] the moral value of lucidity” (Camus 1962: 153). Towards
47
“POST”-DILEMMAS
the end of the novel, Mano, the man of mixed race, succeeds in finding a
sense of belonging in South Africa, when he fully identifies with the plight of
a black man, a fellow prisoner on Death Row. It is during such an epiphanic moment of solidarity that he finally transforms the absurd into meaning:
“What a fury of freedom I felt … No, I was not a common murderer of old
women — my life had a political meaning — my death would be seeding
the future!” (284).
To end my comparative considerations of what in the case of Kundera
and Breytenbach we may refer to as ‘postmodernism of resistance’, I have
invoked Kafka, the master interpreter of absurdity. I acknowledge, accordingly, that both Kundera and Breytenbach meditate on the trap of “larger
systems, which only accentuate the frailty of human needs in all life”
(Misurella 1993: 2); such an existential concern is explored through several
fictional and metafictional devices — narratives within narratives, and various shifts of generic conventions that have come to delineate the postmodern condition. What then prompts simultaneously a postcolonial reading of
such global — postmodernist — tendencies? It is the fact that the metaphysical is provoked not in individualistic isolation (as a strand of the postmodern). Rather the postcolonial is invoked by the “impersonal, uncontrollable,
incalculable, incomprehensible monster of History” (Kundera 1988:11 ),
usually emanating from oppressive regimes — which are “prosaic and
material hyperboles [of bureaucratic tyranny], boundless labyrinths” (107)
— desperate to simulate normality: that geographical edge which manifests
itself as an ‘unbearable simulacrum of being’.
References
Achebe, C. 1988. “The Novelist as Teacher”, in Hopes and Impediments: Selected
Essays 1965-1987. Oxford: Heinemann, pp. 27-31.
Annus, E. and R. Hughes. 2004. “Reversals of the Postmodern and the Late Soviet
Simulacrum”, in Cornis-Pope, M. and J. Neubauer (eds). History of the Literary
Cultures of East-Central Europe. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 54-65.
Appiah, K.A. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York:
Norton.
Baudrillard, J. 1983. Simulations. Tr. Paul Foss. New York: Semiotext(e).
Bhabha H. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Boehmer, Elleke. 1995. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
48
Breytenbach, B. 1989. Memory of Snow and of Dust. Emmarentia: Taurus.
Breytenbach, B. 1996. Notes from the Middle World. Pessoa Lecture (unpublished),
University of Natal.
Brink, A. 1998. “Taking the Gap in The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, in: The
Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino. London:
Macmillan, pp. 269-288.
Camus, A. 1962 [1955]. “Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka”, in: Gray,
R. (ed). Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
pp. 147-155.
Connor, S. 1997. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the
Contemporary. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cornis-Pope, M. and J. Neubauer (eds). 2004. History of the Literary Cultures of EastCentral Europe. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Coullie, J.L. and J.U. Jacobs (eds). 2004. Aka Breyten Breytenbach: Critical
Approaches to His Writings and Paintings. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1972. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Viking.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by
Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dimitriu, Ileana Sora. 1996. “Translations of Self: Interview with Breyten
Breytenbach”, in Current Writing 8(1), pp. 90-101.
Gaylard, G. 2005. After Colonialism: African Postmodernism and Magical Realism.
Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Harvey, D. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge MA: Blackwell.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction.
London: Routledge.
Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Jeyifo, B. 1990. “For Chinua Achebe: The Resilience of Obierka”, in: Petersen, K.H.
and A. Rutherford (eds). Chinua Achebe: A Celebration. Oxford/ Plymouth, NH:
Heinemann, pp. 51-70.
Krasztev, P. 2004. “Quoting Instead of Living: Postmodern Literature before and after
the Changes in East-Central Europe”, in: Cornis-Pope, M. and J. Neubauer
(eds). History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Amsterdam:
Benjamins, pp. 70-82.
Kundera, M. 1995 [1984]. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Translated by Michael
Henry Heim. London: Faber.
Kundera, M. 1988. The Art of the Novel. Translated by Linda Asher. London: Faber.
Loomba, A. et al. (eds). 2005. Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham/ London:
Duke University Press, pp. 1-38.
McEwan, I. 1990. “An Interview with Milan Kundera” (1984), in: Bradbury, M. The
Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction. London: Fontana, pp.
205-221.
49
“POST”-DILEMMAS
Misurella, F. 1993. Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs. Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press.
Okri, B. 1997. A Way of Being Free. London: Phoenix House.
Quayson, A. 2000. Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Rushdie, S. 1991. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London:
Granta.
Said, E. 1994. Representations of the Intellectual. London: Vintage.
Young, R. 2001. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
FROM BRICK LANE TO ALENTEJO BLUE: CROSS-CULTURAL
ENCOUNTERS IN MONICA ALI’S WRITINGS
ELISABETTA MARINO
University of Rome “Tor Vergata”
Abstract: This paper focuses on the different ways in which Bangladeshi-British
writer Monica Ali deals with cross-cultural encounters. While in her debut novel
she concentrated on the secluded British Bangladeshi community in East-End
London, in her second novel, set in Portugal, she approaches the theme from
a wider perspective, breaking through the invisible walls of the ethnic niche.
This paper sets out to explore the way the pivotal, often exploited and
certainly much debated issue of “cross-cultural encounters” has been dealt
with by British Bangladeshi writer Monica Ali in her two books: her 2003
debut novel entitled Brick Lane, (a poignant, albeit not always truthful,
insight into the problematic life of London Banglatown immigrants, which
secured her name among the top twenty young British novelists according
to Granta Magazine), and her latest effort, Alentejo Blue (2006), set in fictional Mamarrosa, in the Portuguese rural region of Alentejo, where the
paths of native villagers, tourists, and expatriates apparently cross, without
really touching one another.
Most critics and journalists lamented a fracture, a disappointing lack of
continuity between Ali’s first and second novel. To mention just a few, Sean
O’Brien remarked in The Independent that “Ali has declined to satisfy any
expectation that [in her next book] she would offer more of the same”
(http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/ reviews/), while Liesl
Schillinger pointed out in The New York Times that Alentejo Blue “has so different a voice, tempo, mood and theme from […] Brick Lane, that the two
seem to share no family resemblance, no authorial DNA. It’s almost as if
they were produced by different writers” (http://www.nytimes.com/
2006/06/25/books/review/25schillinger.html). Conversely, this paper aims at
showing that beyond the obvious external differences in setting, plot, choice
of characters and even technique employed by the writer, the two volumes
stem from similar reflections on cross-cultural encounters and, therefore,
52
share the same core: both focus on the theme of displacement (and the
consequent feelings of imbalance on the part of the characters, often associated with their physical and mental derangement, with their incapability
of expressing themselves through language), and the resulting urge — often
not successfully fulfilled — to re-define and negotiate one’s identity. One difference is that in Alentejo Blue, by means of wide-angle and magnifying
lenses, Monica Ali seems to have broadened her perspective beyond the
boundaries of a specific ethnic group. She even seems to encourage the
reader to look at the same phenomena she had previously dealt with from
different points of view, by staging a “role reversal play” which, as this paper
will highlight, powerfully challenges and displaces the center, thus undermining the very concepts of “center” and “periphery” the asymmetric relationship between colonizer and colonized, domineering and dominated has
often been grounded on.
Brick Lane follows the development of three main characters, whose
life is led within the invisible but apparently impenetrable borders of
London Banglatown, along Brick Lane: Chanu, a fat, middle aged, highly
cultivated Bangladeshi, who moved to London many years before the
beginning of the story (whose time-span stretches between 1985 and 2002);
Nazneen, his much younger and subjugated Bangladeshi wife, who met
him for the first time when she arrived in England; the second generation
immigrant Karim who, later on in the plot, turns into Nazneen’s lover and
becomes progressively involved in defending Muslim communities across
the world after 9/11 and its backlash connected with the outbreak of “the
American War against Islamic terrorism”. One of the most striking elements
of the plot - which Monica Ali probably derived from the The Power to
Choose by Naila Kabeer (2000), a book that provided the novel with a solid
sociological framework - is the absence of a real encounter between the
mainstream and the ethnic community, which remain mutually segregated,
thus highlighting the character of “encapsulated” and “closely knit” that,
according to literary critic and sociologist John Eade (1997), is one of the
most remarkable traits of the Bangladeshi enclaves in the UK. The world of
Brick Lane is therefore thoroughly monocultural, with virtually no mention
(or just a few hints) of anyone who does not share a Bangladeshi background. Moreover, the protagonists appear to be entirely absorbed, almost
obsessed with the problem of finding their “location” in the world, which
almost never coincides with the place they live in, and often identifies with
53
“POST”-DILEMMAS
their re-imagined mother-country. Chanu, for example, nurtures together
with many Bangladeshi immigrants the dream of making enough money to
“go back home”, build a big house and live comfortably, and of being
regarded by his fellow countrymen as one of the “Londhoni”, those wealthy
men who ‘had made it’ in the mythical land of riches ‘across seven seas and
thirteen rivers’ (besides being the first, tentative title of Monica Ali’s debut
novel, this is the way the Western world, especially the UK, was commonly
called by the Bangladeshi immigrants). He is affected by what, in the novel,
he himself humorously calls “going home syndrome”. Chanu’s degree of
displacement undermines his identity formation process so dramatically
that, when he eventually decides to indulge, for the first time in the thirty
years of his life in Great Britain, in a family tour of the center of London, he
cannot but reply they are from Bangladesh to the man who asks him where
they are from while taking a picture of Chanu and his family (Ali 2003: 296).
At the end of the novel, after losing his job and still unable to cope and fit in,
Chanu surrenders and goes back to his land of origin, poor and lonely, the
way he had left, and probably even suspended in a vacuum of place and
time, since the Bangladesh he knew many years before had certainly undergone many transformations.
Chanu’s wife, Nazneen, the only character that at the end of the story
manages to find a balance in her liminal position between countries (she
eventually succeeds in setting up her evocative business of “fusion” —
Asian/Western — clothes), shares for most of the novel the same displacement as her husband, further problematized by her lack of proficiency in
English, by the fact that the only meaningful things she can say in the host
language are “sorry and thank you” (19). When Nazneen first ventures into
Banglatown, outside the claustrophobic setting of her council house, she
gets lost; she is too shy and folded into her world of silence to ask for help
or information; it is only by allowing the familiar memories of her life back
home to overlap the strange and hostile environment she is confronted with
that she manages to recover her sense of orientation. The horns of the cars,
therefore, blare “like […] ancient muezzin[s]” (54), the screaming schoolchildren are probably just emitting their normal cries “as loud as [those of]
peacocks” (55), “to get to the other side of the street without being hit by a
car [is] like walking out in the monsoon and hoping to dodge the raindrops”
(54).
54
Even Karim, the young activist Nazneen had fallen in love with - since
he seemed to possess what everybody was looking for, “a place in the
world” (264) - ends up deranged in another country, probably “go[ing] for
jihad in some far away place” (486), keeping his meaningful stammer in
both English and Bengali, signifying his actual incapability of establishing a
real contact with the world outside of himself. As Nazneen remarks at the
end of the book:
He was who he was. Question and answer. The same as her. Maybe
not even that. Karim had never even been to Bangladesh. Nazneen felt a
stab of pity. Karim was born a foreigner. When he spoke in Bengali, he
stammered. Why had it puzzled her? She saw only what she wanted to see.
Karim did not have a place in the world. That was why he defended it (449).
In Alentejo Blue (2006), the village of Mamarrosa — where even the
local internet café is strikingly isolated and does not have any internet connection — becomes the setting where the Portuguese seemingly meet people coming from Holland, England, and Germany. However, a close reading
of the novel reveals that there is no actual exchange nor sharing between
the characters, and the very structure of the volume — a fragmented collection of individual stories, loosely connected with one another, and narrated
either in the third or in the first person — turns the writing into a scattered
mirror, into a “heap of broken images” that reminds the reader of T.S. Eliot’s
Waste Land (1976: section 1, line 22), where communication is no longer
possible (be it said incidentally, Ali openly quotes T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday
in the epigraph of the book). Similar to the Bangladeshi immigrants of Ali’s
first volume, every character in Alentejo Blue appears to be displaced, his or
her mind lost somewhere else. Among the Portuguese characters, Vasco,
the bartender, decodes reality through the filter of his long-lasting experience in America, and so does Teresa Ervanaria, whose mind is stuck in
Paris, where she spent fifteen important years of her life. Young Teresa, the
would be au-pair in London, closely resembles many Asian immigrants
about to move to Western countries when she imagines that, despite her
poor English, she will definitely succeed; she often re-creates in her mind
the country of her future settlement, has “vision[s] of London” (Ali 2006:
141), fills the imaginary space with commodities, with all the hopes and
expectations that are frustrated in her mother-country: “In London, thought,
she would have her own television. Her room would be modern, perhaps
55
“POST”-DILEMMAS
with fitted wardrobes. She was to have her own bathroom” (154). Like the
Bangladeshis, the Portuguese also cherish the myth of the person who
acquires a huge fortune abroad and then comes back home, as in the character of Marco Alfonso Rodriguez, the man everybody talks about and
whose amazing fortunes are probably just a hoax.
Even the “foreigners” share the abovementioned feelings of uneasiness and imbalance, besides mentally projecting the lands they know to fill
the gap of what they ignore. The German Dieter lives somehow “suspended”, as a misfit; he remarks on any event with the sentence “in Germany
…”; however, when he is asked the reason why he does not go back to his
motherland, since he seems to admire it so much, he simply replies with “if
I never see that country again so long as I may live, so much the better for
me. Germany? No, never” (65). After a few chapters the reader gathers that
Dieter is going to move to India, in what appears to be a perpetual quest for
himself, for his ‘place in the world’. Henry Stanton, the English writer, experiences analogous feelings: he seems to be unable to mix with anybody but
English expatriates, thus mimicking the same clustered, tightly interwoven
community within the wider community that is typical of the Bangladeshi
immigrants. Besides, he experiences analogous problems at expressing
himself, even in his own language: he’s entangled in his own words and
knowledge and cannot proceed with the writing of his book because he
knows so much about the subject that he cannot communicate it. At the
very end of the novel, this character also drifts away to another country,
without completing his volume, without being able to bridge the gap
between himself and the rest of the community.
Monica Ali, however, reaches the apex of her critical strength when
she describes Mr & Mrs Potts’ dysfunctional family of British expatriates, and
middle-aged Eileen and her husband, a couple of English tourists. The reader is introduced to the Potts through the words of a new Melvillian Ishmael
(the name “Ishmael” is mentioned by Mrs Potts later on in the story): Mr
Michael Potts, a former drug dealer whose nickname tells about distant
countries and almost betrays his conception of a life adrift, “on the run”
(61): “Everyone calls me China” — Mr Potts remarks in his “broken English”
— “Call me whatever you like. Who said that thing about a name being like
a torch?” (46). His “unattractive, uneducated, disabled” (31) daughter Ruby
lives her life incommunicado, in a muffled world her “prehistoric hearing
aid” (31) and her “congested vowels and macerated diction” prevent her
56
from understanding and interacting with. She is always by herself, even
when she is surrounded by people (37), and sex, followed by miscarriages
and abortions, becomes her only way of establishing the simulacrum of a
contact with the world outside. The little Jay Potts (whose name in slang
means “joint”) plays the part of the second-generation immigrant of the
Bangladeshi communities across the UK, thus resembling Chanu and
Nazneen’s two daughters in Brick Lane. He questions himself on the puzzle
of his identity, when he asks his mother whether his knowledge of the host
language will turn him into a Portuguese (101) and, just like the children of
immigrants, acts as a translator when his mother is accused of murder
because she helped Ruby to get rid of the baby she was expecting, in a
country were abortion is still illegal. This is probably the most important
scene of the whole novel, where Christine Potts, a plain woman who used
to get attached to single words without being able to deliver a proper
speech, openly mentions for the first and only time in the volume the problems immigrants have to grapple with, and seems to invite the reader to
look at the same phenomena from a different, overturned perspective:
[The policeman] started talking then. I wasn’t listening properly, I was
thinking about when you see the Asian kids translate for their mums. The
mums wear saris or baggy coloured pyjamas or sometimes a big black bag
that covers everything except their eyes, so you don’t really expect them to
understand anything much. I was thinking I’m like that now. I’m the bloody
foreigner (204).
Eileen and her husband, the English tourists, develop two different
strategies of “encountering the other”. The husband perfectly embodies the
stereotype of the “sedentary traveller” who, according to critic Syed
Manzurul Islam (1996), never really crosses petrified thresholds and mentally remains in the familiar environment back home, while employing the
same logic of a colonist in his relationship with the country he is visiting. As
Ali points out, he “buries the dining-room table with maps and leaflets and
brochures and books while he plans the invasion strategy” (2006: 113).
When he ventures outside, however, just the way it had happened to
Nazneen in Ali’s first novel, he is confronted with and overwhelmed by too
different and unrecognizable an environment, and therefore he has to go
back to his hotel room. As he tells his wife, “I’m sorry […] but I am turning
the car around as soon as I can” (113). Conversely, Eileen sees in the foreign
57
“POST”-DILEMMAS
country a possibility to escape from the miseries of her marital life, dominated by an impenetrable lack of communication. She is another character
“on the run”, trying to find her ‘place in the world’, although she is aware
she will fit in only if she wears the mask of the fool:
I could run away and be here. I could be one of those English women
with fat ankles and capillaried cheeks and hair coming down from under a
tattered hat who set up in places like this, to keep bees or grow runner
beans or save donkeys. […] everyone would know me and say in a fond
sort of way, ah, there she goes, the crazy English woman. (115)
One more element needs to be explained: the reason why Monica Ali
chose Portugal as the setting of her second novel. Apart from personal reasons (Monica Ali owns a place in the Alentejo region), Portugal seems to
strikingly join the opposites. It is a former colonial empire (as the reader is
reminded of with the mention of Salazar and territories such as Angola and
Macau), but also, in China’s words about Alentejo, “the poorest region in the
poorest country in the European Union. Until all them eastern monkeys
climbed on board” (118) — the last part making reference to contemporary
migratory fluxes. By being once the domineering and now, somehow, the
dominated, by being the “centre” and the “periphery”, Portugal seems to be
the perfect setting for Monica Ali’s re-telling, from a different perspective, of
her previously told story of cross-cultural encounters since, as one can read
in the very final words of the novel, “there’s more than one way to look at
[a story]” (299).
Internet References
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/article623356.ece
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/books/review/25schillinger.html?ex=13088880
00&en=74db9be9983caa0b&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
References
Ali, Monica. 2003. Brick Lane, London. Black Swan.
Ali, Monica. 2006. Alentejo Blue, London. Doubleday.
58
Eade, J. 1997. “Keeping the Options Open: Bangladeshis in a Global City”, in A.J.
Kershen, (ed.). London the Promised Land? The Migrant Experience in a
Capital City. Sidney: Avebury, pp. 91-105.
Eliot, T.S. 1976. The Waste Land. Varese: Mursia.
Islam, S.M. 1996. The Ethics of Travel: from Marco Polo to Kafka. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Kabeer, N. 2000. The Power to Choose, Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market
Decisions in London and Dhaka. London: Verso.
PROTEAN IDENTITIES AND INVISIBLE BORDERS IN
HARI KUNZRU’S THE IMPRESSIONIST
DANIELA ROGOBETE
University of Craiova
Abstract: The paper analyses some strategies of legitimating national
(postcolonial) identity in the context of globalization and of the new sociopolitical changes. It focuses on India as a model of a pluralistic nation prone to
cultural inclusiveness and eclecticism, where the negotiation of identities is in
full swing, operating through post-representational techniques and functioning
according to the politics of post-ethnicity. The text chosen to illustrate all these
aspects is Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist.
Starting from Derrida’s famous pun which plays with the French homophones hauntology vs. ontology and focusing upon the ‘ghostly absences’ of
the past coming back to haunt and infect the present, this paper attempts a
revaluation of the debate concerning authentic colonial/postcolonial identity as illustrated in Hari Kunzru’s novel The Impressionist (2002). Issues such
as authentic indigenity vs. inauthentic cosmopolitan hybridity, the project of
nationalism and the complex process of negotiating cultural, political and
national identities are once more brought forth and rediscussed from different perspectives.
Belonging to the young generation of Indian writers and enjoying a
huge success, Hari Kunzru seems to have brought a breath of fresh air into
the realm of what is generally called Indian literature in English by offering
startling interpretations to traditional debates. He has a particular way of
exploring and analysing the ghostly remains of the imperial mechanisms of
power, of getting down into the essence of both Westernness and
Easternness, of demolishing stereotypes so that, for instance, Westernness
acquires the gloss of exoticism that for long time belonged exclusively to the
Orient, of demonstrating the devastating effects of colonial inheritance and
present-day globalization upon individual identities.
Quite often compared to Salman Rushdie for his critical bitterness, linguistic playfulness and subtle humour, and to Zadie Smith for the unexpect-
60
ed way of dealing with the Postcolonial agenda, Hari Kunzru’s rise to fame
occurred as an expected event, anticipated by critics and reviewers, but culminated in a literary scandal. His warmly received first novel The
Impressionist (2002), highly acclaimed in India and generally praised in
Europe, was immediately shortlisted for numerous prizes and actually won
one of the most prestigious literary prizes in Britain. His novel was declared
the winner of John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best debut novel but Kunzru,
convinced that “questions of literary value are inseparable from politics”,
turned down the prize as a form of protest against the racist politics of its
main sponsor The Mail of Sunday. He rose against the newspaper’s “editorial policy of vilifying and demonizing refugees and asylum seekers” (The
New York Times 23 May, 2004) denouncing its “extremely xenophobic” position and demanding that the money should be given to the Refugee
Council.
All the initial extremely favourable publicity turned into criticism mainly directed against the novel’s protagonist, Pran Nath, half-Indian, halfEnglish, a character that never comes to life fully and is too shallow and too
sketchy to inspire the reader to empathize and identify with him. Generally
praised for its subtle humour and cool mockery of the ‘imperial machinery’,
for its wit and spontaneity, The Impressionist has, since its release, been criticized for promoting an amoral, goalless character always drifting among
places and identities. He has been accused of being a symbol rather than a
living character, of contradicting some of the already established postcolonial truths and of revealing himself, in the eyes of many critics, as hollow
and emotionless and refusing empathy. In spite of all criticism, Kunzru’s
novel reopens old debates and tackles traditional postcolonial issues from
new angles.
Hari Kunzru seems to start from the recurrent postcolonial treatment
of identity and from the Christian idea of an immortal soul, an immutable
essence always the same in every possible circumstance, and arrives at a
real dilemma: immutable essence or context-dependent character? The
way in which Kunzru deals with this problem — by creating a character
continuously reinventing himself as an Impressionist on a stage — relies
upon many theoretical debates related to the most stringent issues of
Postcolonial Studies. Appiah’s description of postcolonialism as a “condition of pessimism” (Appiah 1991: 353) is recognizable here in the initial
series of traumatic events both preceding and following Pran’s birth, events
61
“POST”-DILEMMAS
which shatter his cosy reality, deprive him of the urge for self-analysis and
endow him instead with an excessive eagerness for metamorphosis.
Pran is conceived in the middle of a monsoon flood by an idiotic Indian
beauty and a white English forester. From their brief, illicit encounter the
mother, sent to become the wife of an important person in Agra, gives birth
to a child and dies. The child’s fair complexion is taken at first as a sign of
purity and superiority (purity becomes one of the obsessions in the text):
Pran Nath is undeniably good looking. […] Pran Nath’s skin is a source of
pride to everyone. Its whiteness is not the nasty blue-blotched color of a
fresh-off-the-boat Angrezi or the grayish pallor of a dying person, but a perfect milky hue, like that of the marble the craftsmen chip into ornate
screens down by the Tajjganj. […] It is proof, cluck the aunties, of the family’s superior blood. Blood is important. (Kunzru 2002: 7)
The importance of blood in judging and labelling people, the stereotypical descriptions isolating individuals into strict categories, reversing binary
oppositions and celebrating impurity are recurrent themes in the novel,
illustrated by Pran’s multiple impersonations and anticipated from the first
pages of the novel: “Fire and water. Earth and air. Meditate on these oppositions and reconcile them. Collapse them in on themselves, send them spiraling down a tunnel of blackness to reemerge whole, one with the all,
mere aspects of the great unity of things whose name is God” (Kunzru 2002:
2). This extreme chameleonic malleability enables Pran to embrace different identities in order to stay alive or to adjust himself to the new realities
he is forced to inhabit. When this orphan boy is driven out of his father’s
home after the secret of his birth is revealed, he grows up to be the perfect
impersonator who accumulates layer upon layer of fake identities. Born as
Pran but later on metamorphosed into Rukhsana, Pretty Bobby, Jonathan
Bridgeman — Colonized and Colonizer —, Kunzru’s hero is free to reinvent
himself at the same time casting a fresh glance upon the realities he
encounters. Perspectives are continuously shifted, boundaries are
destroyed and identities, caught in the process of negotiation, are turned
into nothing else but mere spectral selves haunting “ghostly locations”.
Derrida’s spectral entities might work here too towards a possible explanation of the tendency to accumulate fake identities: “Facing up to the others,
before the others, its fellows, here then is the apparition of a strange creature: at the same time Life, Thing, Beast, Object, Commodity, Automaton —
in a word, spectre. This Thing, which is no longer altogether a thing, here it
62
goes and unfolds, it unfolds itself, it develops what it engenders through a
quasi-spontaneous generation, it gives birth through its head, it extracts
from its wooden head a whole lineage of fantastic or prodigious creatures,
whims, chimera, non-ligneous character parts” (Derrida 1994: 156).
Kunzru’s concern in tackling the problem of negotiating identities is to
avoid “strategic essentialism” rejecting both a too positive and a too negative treatment of the Third World. He also rejects traditional ideas related to
the tight connection established between location and identity, adopting
instead a skeptical position focused upon relativisation and miscegenation.
He contradicts Jameson’s theory upon the equation between personal and
national identity (Jameson 1986: 65) taking Aijaz Ahmad’s side in the
debate, i.e. his rejection of this equation, as presented in his article
“Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory” (1987). The
question raised by Pran Nath’s adventurous play with identities is whether a
newly assumed identity can completely erase all traces of the previous
ones. The apparent answer is “yes” and it is supported by the way in which
the narration is built up to the final episodes of the novel when repressed
identities come back to haunt.
The recurrent device seems to be the narrative absence since once a
new identity is adopted nothing more is mentioned about the old one; once
a new name is taken, all others seem to be forever forgotten and never
mentioned again. Quite frequently, a certain amount of doubt is cast upon
the whole narration and the reader can never be entirely sure whether the
new impersonation belongs to the same character or whether it is a new
one altogether. Pran himself finally appears as a huge ‘identity gap’ where
an inflation of too many fake identities and phony masks transform him into
a ‘cardboard self’. In order to make his point about the dangers of treating
identity as a pure, immutable entity, Kunzru relies upon what Gayatri Spivak
(1987) established as main surviving methods of the subaltern: invisibility,
mimicry and othering processes. Kunzru’s character makes use of all these
things turning them into advantages and reminding of Appadurai’s reaction
against the “fetishisation of identity” (Appadurai in Dayal 1996: 134).
The process of de-fetishisation of identity can also produce, according
to Diana Brydon, a “counter-cult of authenticity” (qtd. in Dayal 1996: 123) by
applying deconstructive and transgressive strategies focused upon the
“hyphenated character” of identity as theorised by Appadurai in what he
called the “formula of hyphenation” (Appadurai 1993a: 803) emphasizing
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
the alternative tradition of cultural plurality, hybridity and impurity.
Invisibility becomes a strange counterpart to multiplicity as Pran, alias
Bobby, can make himself invisible to “others, shape-shifting, changing
names and keeping his motives hidden. […] Bobby’s skin is not a boundary
between things but the thing itself, a screen on which certain effects take
place. Ephemeral curiosities. Tricks of the light” (Kunzru 2002: 250)
Pran’s exquisite art of dissimulation and mimicry helps Kunzru bring
up the problems of perception and politics of representation as the major
hero is transformed into everything the beholder wants to see. The readiness with which Pran assumes a new identity, first obliged by external circumstances, later on by free will, turns him into “somebody who is not
available to himself” (Kunzru 2002: 250). Pran’s peregrinations in life along
a diversity of roads and identities, among people and social environments
provide enough points of discussion and give rise to theoretical speculations about the best way to envisage identity as an unstable social construct
rather than an innate datum. His meandering life could be analysed by
means of what R. Radhakrishnan (1993: 755) calls the politics of transgression translated through a complete fluidity in representing personal and
national identities, beyond boundaries of nationalism and nativism. This
post-ethnical approach seems to perfectly suit Hari Kunzru whose hero
belongs to no place in particular yet all these “ghostly locations” haunt and
shape his personality.
The same considerations can be applied when issues such as home or
homelessness as opposed to belonging are brought up. ‘Home’ appears in
The Impressionist as a social and emotional construct with no particular
location. ‘Homelessness’ is metaphorically turned into an emblem of the
human condition whereas the problem of belonging becomes a tricky matter going back once again to identity and spatial politics. Kunzru seems to
share Pico Iyer’s opinion that “nowhere was home and everywhere” (Iyer
1989: 24).
The continuous coming back to the problems of mimicry reopens the
discussion upon simulacrum versus authenticity. Transparency becomes
the key word of the elusive fictional universe of the novel, perpetually
sought after but never really achieved even if Pran is constantly treated as
“tissue paper held up to the sun” (Kunzru 2002: 250). The kaleidoscopic
identities displayed by Kunzru’s novels are caught between the Western
reign of the simulacrum and the Eastern “reflective immediate mimeticism”
64
(Dayal 1996: 123) totally demolishing the bogus of authentic postcolonial
identity.
The main question raised by Kunzru’s The Impressionist in the matter
of authenticity is related to where it lies precisely. The same question has
long preoccupied the world of Postcolonial Studies. Authenticity has often
been sought in the indigenous purity advocated most of the time by cultural nationalism or in the modernist project of diasporic postnationalism.
Aijaz Ahmad was one of the theorists of what was perceived to be the conflicting binarism opposing indigenity (equated with unspoilt tradition) and
modernity in the context of the Third World:
Used in relation to the equally problematic category of ‘Third World’, ‘cultural nationalism’ resonates equally frequently with ‘tradition’, simply
inverting the tradition/modernity binary of the modernization theorists in
an indigenist direction so that ‘tradition’ is said to be, for the Third World
always better than ‘modernity’ which opens up a space for defense of the
most obscurantist positions in the name of cultural nationalism. There
appears to be, at the very least, a widespread implication in the ideology
of cultural nationalism, as it surfaces in literary theory, that each nation of
the ‘Third World’ has a ‘culture’ and a ‘tradition’, and that to speak from
within that culture and that tradition is itself an act of anti-imperialism”
(Ahmad 1992: 9).
In Kunzru’s case, the protagonist of his first novel strives to achieve or
prove his authenticity by trying to convince the others of his perfect whiteness or by trying to conceal his imperfect brownness. He challenges the
artificial construct of Britishness and conducts a personal search into the
essence of Englishness. His perfect art of dissimulation, his extraordinary
intuition and chameleonic adaptability make him imitate the English people
around him in a continuous search for “an organ of whiteness” that could
turn him into the perfect Englishman. His capacity of mimicry is materialized in the imitation of behaviours, accents and mentalities which provide
him with a ghostlike identity which perfectly deceives the others: “They
hear an accent and see a face and a set of clothes, and put them together
into a person” (Kunzru 2002: 245).
Pran’s odyssey takes him from the man he calls his father and from a
childish arrogant and superior identity to the most unexpected places. As
Pran, he is envied for his white complexion and high birth even if the
astrologer summoned to read his future is unable to disentangle the intricate threads of the boy’s life placed under the sign of “impurity”: “The boy’s
65
“POST”-DILEMMAS
future was obscure. The astrologer could predict none of the usual things —
length of life, marital prospects, wealth. Patterns emerged, only to fade
when another aspect of the conjunction was considered. […] Clusters of
possibilities formed, then fell apart” (26). This also seems to be the way in
which the narration is built. The initial admiration for a line of pure blood is
automatically turned into despise and hatred when the secret of his humble, illegitimate birth is found out. His arrogance and boyish naughtiness are
now accounted for through his “bad blood” which becomes a good reason
for driving him out of his house right after his father’s death. “Impurities,
blendings, pollutions, smearings and muckings-up of all kinds are bound to
flow from such a blend of blood, which offends against every tenet of orthodox religion” (39).
Once in the street he starts thinking for the first time about race,
colour and miscegenation as he realizes that the source of his humiliation
is his half-Indianness, half-Englishness. His attempt to find help results in his
being sold and tricked into entering a brothel where, against his will, he is
transformed into Rukhsana. Here he is permanently under drugs and cannot analyse his situation too lucidly, but even so he tries to discover what he
could use to his benefit. The occasion appears with Major Privett-Clamp and
Pran’s new impersonation as his lover — Pretty Bobby. Their first sexual
encounter is ironically presented as the prototype of any colonial
encounter: “Some may be tempted to view this as primarily a political situation. It is after all, Pran’s first direct contact with the machinery of imperial government” (98).
As Pretty Bobby, the Major’s pupil and protégé, he is turned into a silent
witness of backstage political maneuvers and learns his lesson. During a
chaotic hunting party he escapes and creates a new life and a new identity
for himself. Until coming out of the new cocoon under a new identity he
goes around Amristar as The White Boy. His new persona is Robert and he
finds refuge in the house of Reverend MacFarlane, who had become a passionate anthropologist once his missionary duty in India seemed to have
failed. Robert finds himself caught in domestic dissentions, finally playing
the role of an intermediary when the household gets divided mainly by different attitudes towards the Indian experience. The reverend, narrow-minded and unconvincing in his apostolic mission, fails to come closer to the
people because of his aversion for everything Indian. India becomes for him
“lack of limit. Blending. Multiplicity. To him these were just other names for
66
Doubt” (227). On the contrary, Elspeth, his wife, Scottish by birth, gradually
falls in love with India and what she discovers of it, “another way of thinking” and the “mystic synthesis of things” (223).
In the meantime Robert spends his time in expensive night clubs making his apprenticeship in mimicking and trying to be an Englishman.
Stick a personality together. Calico arms. Wooden head. A hat and a set of
overheard opinions. […] Nevertheless, as Bobby builds and inhabits his
puppets he grasps that there is something marvelous about English people. Their lives are structured like pieces of engineering, railway engines
or streamers unpacked and bolted together at the heads of new rivers.
Each one is rigid and assured, built according to blueprints of class and
membership that are almost noble in their invariance, their stern inflexibility. Noble, at least, in the manner that a suspension bridge or a viaduct is
noble” (251).
Pran’s next identity is stolen from a friend who dies in a riot. He takes
his papers and plane tickets to England and assumes his identity wondering
“how easy it is to slough off one life and take up another. Easy when there
is nothing to anchor you. […] He feels he has nothing of the earth in him at
all. When he moves across it, his feet do not touch the surface” (285). His
new life as the orphan Jonathan Bridgeman familiarizes him with the real
experience of living in England and London. He discovers that his new existence is a puzzle whose pieces he has to place in order and whose gaps he
has to fill with family memories, a past and a present. During this stage he
almost reaches perfection in his imitative skills. The ultimate “chameleonism” in his case represents his becoming one with his shadow. Falling in
love with the daughter of his Professor of anthropology at the University, he
tries harder than ever to cast away any possible traces of Otherness so as to
become the perfect Englishman and thus Astarte’s best suitor.
The engagement that follows, first considered an unexpected bliss
which blinds him into following his fiancée’s father to Africa, turns in the
end into a huge deception when he finds out that Star was cheating on him
with a black person, “somebody black as night, as tar, coal, pitch, liquorice
and the suits of funeral directors” (413). She seems to appreciate everything
Pran alias Johnny has been struggling to banish from his life. “This is what
happens. This terrible blurring is what happens when boundaries are
breached. Pigment leaks through skin like ink through blotting paper. It
becomes impossible to tell what is valuable and what is not” (417).
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
The journey to Africa is an unexpected encounter and offers a reenactment on a smaller scale of the traumatic experience of colonialism; instead
of the virgin land unspoilt by civilization they find a troubled reality where
civilization threatens to engulf the last remains of a traditional lifestyle.
Natives are turned into slaves and cheap workers and forced to toil on foreign land and to abandon their traditions, customs and beliefs. Instead of
finding a friendly environment they come against very aggressive people
who finally burst into violence completely destroying and annihilating what
they consider to be the evil spirit of Europeans. The tribe’s communal struggle is directed against the European spirit deemed to have brought evil
changes and a lot of damage. All members of the expedition are killed
except for Johnny in whom the African discover the “black” essence of his
being. The savages keep him unconscious for a couple of days performing
a purifying ritual of exorcising the white spirit in him and reveal his inner
spirit for such a long time stifled under the burden of self-imposed
Englishness.
His art of mimicry constantly reminds us Baudrillard’s (1988) theory of
simulacra and his dichotomy copy/original. With Kunzru, the boundary
between the two is extremely difficult to establish as sometimes the copy
becomes more real than the original or some other times the copy displays
so many ‘ghostly’ original traces that the original itself loses authenticity.
“Everywhere Jonathan finds the originals of copies he has grown up with,
all the absurdities of British India restored to sense by their natural environment. […] Jonathan understands for the first time the English word ‘cosy’,
the need their climate instills in them to pad their blue-veined bodies with
layers of horsehair and mahogany, aspidistras and antimacassars, history,
tradition and share certificates. Being British, he decides, is primarily a matter of insulation” (300).
Kunzru’s hero uses his body as a perpetual negation of the idea of nonhyphenated identity. He acts according to the idea that a monolithic, unitary
identity is absurd, conceiving it instead as an accumulation of “heterogeneous selves and subjectivities” (Radhakrishnan 1993: 752). Kunzru’s protagonist thus accumulates an impressive number of shapes and identities
that transforms him into a “facsimile person”, a “creature of surface” (250)
with no apparent depth or roots. Using Elleke Boehmer’s theoretical
approaches, Kunzru’s novel could be considered a “narrative of transfiguration” (Boehmer 1993: 269) where mutilation becomes a metaphorical way
68
of speaking about the attempt of erasing part of one’s personality in order to
introduce new identity features in the gaps thus created. Self-representation
seen as “writing the body, splicing the self” (275) finds particular means of
expression which include legitimisation of hyphenated identity through
mimicry and dissimulation and elements of “postnational imagery”
(Appadurai 1993b: 428). Pran’s constant transfiguration and self-replication
transform his body into a palimpsest where he inscribes ghostly successive
traces of identity. His body, “as complex as a palimpsest of different symbolic layers — land, mother, scored flesh — is disclosed, opened out and ultimately divided up into multiple constituent narratives of bodily/national
investment” (Boehmer 1993: 275). As long as all these ghostly traces are
kept hidden the betrayal is complete and Pran succeeds in deceiving both
himself and the others but strange circumstances dig up all the silenced
identitarian layers which start taking revenge.
At the end of his journey, after he has embraced so many identities and
inhabited so many lives, Pran is led to the conclusion that “becoming someone is just a question of tailor and remembering to touch the bottom lip to
the ridge of teeth above. Easy, except when that becoming is involuntary,
when fingers ease their grip and the panic sets in that nothing will stop the
slide. Then becoming is fight, running knowing that stopping will be worse
because then the suspicion will surface again that there is no one running”
(463). What he was so careful in hiding and dissimulating comes now to
haunt and take revenge. His non-whiteness comes up from under layers of
fake Englishness to save his life. Derrida’s definition of the specter might be
useful once again: “The ‘Proper’ feature of spectres, like vampires, is that
they are deprived of a specular image, of the true, right specular image (but
who is not so deprived?). How do you recognise a ghost? By the fact that it
does not recognise itself in a mirror. [...] All the spectres which have filed
before us were representations. These representations — leaving aside
their real basis — understood as representations internal to consciousness,
as thoughts in people’s heads, transferred from their objectality back into
the subject, elevated from substance into self-consciousness, are obsessions or fixed ideas” (Derrida 1994: 160-161). In the end all this vain struggle
to appear different turns out to be a mere commuting between realities and
identities; Pran’s predicament is transformed into a postcolonial human
condition, that of a perpetual outsider for ever drifting in search of authen-
69
“POST”-DILEMMAS
ticity as he remains “a locus in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of relevant determinations interact” (de Certeau 1984: xi)
Pran realizes his ambiguous condition when he is in Paris and he witnesses the show of an impressionist upon a stage, selling miracles and
offering illusions; the magician changes faces and modifies his body in a
perfect display of impersonations and shapes until everything is blurred and
reality escapes into illusion. Pran has the same experience on the stage of
life and his entire journey along the meandering path of self-legitimation
and authentication faces him with the impossibility of coming back to a
pristine, unspoilt endemic authenticity. And in the end this is Hari Kunzru’s
conclusion upon a postcolonial authentic identity. The reader cannot sympathize with Pran as there is no coming back to a pre-postcolonial era that
could be deemed as authentic. After that everything is a game of spectral
identities. “There is no escaping it. In between each impression, just at the
moment when one person falls away and the next has yet to take possession, the impressionist is completely blank. There is nothing there at all”
(419).
References
Ahmad, A. 1987. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory”, in
Social Text, no. 17, pp. 3-25.
Ahmad, A. 1992. In Theory, Classes, Nations, Literatures. London & New York: Verso.
Appadurai, A. 1993a. “The heart of Whiteness”, in Callaloo, Vol. 16, No. 4, p.796-807.
Appadurai, A. 1993b. “Patriotism and Its Futures”, in Public Culture: Bulletin of the
Society for Transnational Cultural Studies, 11, pp. 411-429.
Appiah, A. 1991. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonialism?”, in
Critical Inquiry, No. 17, pp. 336-357.
Baudrillard, J. 1988. Selected Writings. Edited by Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Boehmer, Elleke. 1993. “Transfiguring: Colonial Body into Postcolonial Narrative”, in
NOVEL: A Form on Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 3, African Literature Issue (Spring), pp.
268-277.
Certeau, M. de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall.
Berkeley: California University Press.
Dayal, S. 1996. “Postcolonialism’s Possibilities: Subcontinental Diasporic
Intervention”, in Cultural Critique, No. 33 (Spring), p. 113-149.
Derrida, J. 1994. The Specters of Marx — The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning,
and the New International. London: Routledge.
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Iyer, P. 1989. Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Stories: And Other Reports from
the No-So-Far-East. New York: Vintage.
Jameson, F. 1986. “Third World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism”, in
Social Text, no. 15, pp. 65-88.
Kunzru, H. 2002. The Impressionist. London: Penguin Books.
Radhakrishnan, R. 1992. “Nationalism, Gender and the Narrative of Identity”, in
Nationalism and Sexualities. Eds. Andrew Parker, et al. New York: Routledge,
pp. 77-95.
Radhakrishnan, R. 1993. “Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity”, in Callaloo,
Vol. 16, No. 4, On “Postcolonial Discourse”: A Special Issue (Autumn), p. 750771.
Spivak, Gayatri. 1987. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography”, in Other
Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, pp. 197-221.
AN ARTIST OF FLOATING WOR(L)DS
MARIA ªTEFÃNESCU
University of Alba Iulia
Abstract: The paper discusses the various forms of narrative unreliability
which occur in Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. It also compares and
contrasts these different strategies with those present in The Remains of the
Day.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s description of his first three novels — A Pale View of
Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and The Remains of the
Day (1989) — as “three attempts to write the same book” (quoted in Lewis
2000:133) may be understood as indicative both of an underlying thematic
unity and of a similar narrative strategy used to create the three fictional
worlds. Regarding this latter aspect, the fact that each novel foregrounds a
first person narrator who attempts to recount and assess some significant
moments of his/her life enables Ishiguro to explore the complexity of
homodiegetic narration and exploit, in particular, its potential susceptibility
to various forms of unreliability. In order to support their view that Wayne C.
Booth’s concept of unreliable narration (1961) needs further enlargement,
James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin (1999: 89) find their cue, and “a lesson in sophisticated homodiegesis and its relation to the ethics of reading”,
in The Remains of the Day. In the present article, I attempt to argue that,
while sharing a number of narrative features with Ishiguro’s subsequent
novel, An Artist of the Floating World introduces the readers to an even
more unsettling instance of unreliablilty, in which the final éclaircissement
— in the form of the protagonist’s eventually having his moment of nondeceptive self-knowledge — is permanently deferred.
When, in the early 1960s, Wayne C. Booth describes the various kinds
of distance which may separate the implied author from the narrator of a
story — on the axis of either facts or values, or of both — his terminology
indicates two narrative possibilities which, between them, cover the full
extent of this distance:
72
“I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the implied author’s
norms), unreliable when he does not” (1961: 158-59).
In a recent attempt to revise the concept of unreliable homodiegetic
narration, James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin (1999) explore the challenging narratological complexity of K. Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in
order to make the case that “unreliability occurs not just along the axes of
facts/events and values/judgments but also along the axis of
knowledge/perception” (Phelan & Martin 1999: 88). Broadening Booth’s initial classification, Phelan and Martin argue that narrators may deviate from
the implied author’s views in their role as reporters and evaluators, as well
as in that of readers or interpreters of the circumstances of which they provide an account. According to Phelan and Martin’s extension of the concept
of unreliability,
unreliable reporting occurs along the axis of facts/events; unreliable evaluating occurs along the axis of ethics/evaluation; and unreliable reading
occurs along the axis of knowledge/perception (1999: 94).
Given the fact that the authorial audience’s response to a fallible narrator can be twofold — either blunt rejection of the teller’s words or a supplementation of his/her account —, Phelan and Martin go on to identify six
kinds of unreliability: misreporting, misreading, misregarding, underreporting, underreading and underregarding.
As pointed out in a number of recent studies (Phelan & Martin 1999,
Cohn 2000, Zerweck 2001), diagnosing unreliability is an effect of interpretative strategies prompted by the readers’ growing increasingly suspicious
of the narrator’s account of the story. However, since homodiegetic narration cannot, by definition, leave room for an omniscient (and therefore fully
reliable) exposition of fictional facts and values, the readers are bound to
consent to an initial “willing suspension of disbelief” in the narrator’s words,
as a necessary starting point for the coagulation of the fictional world. As
their reading progresses, a process of repeated negotiations and reassessments may take place, in which the narrator’s statements are verified
against independent textual evidence and/or background information and
regarded as more or less reliable, with the consequence that the readers’
own understanding of the fictional situation may undergo significant revisions.
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
Although on their first contact with K. Ishiguro’s second novel, An Artist
of the Floating World, the narratologically-minded readers are likely to be
alert to the potential pitfalls of first person narration, early in the story they
will find no reason to doubt the protagonist’s account of some past or more
recent circumstances of his life. Masuji Ono emerges as a retired elderly
painter who takes little interest in his considerable social prestige, reminisces about past events and acquaintances and appears keen on securing
a successful marriage for his younger daughter, Noriko. It is only after Ono
mentions his contribution to the opening of the Migi-Hidari inn (almost one
third through the novel) that the readers become aware of the protagonist’s
active involvement in Japan’s nationalist and expansionist policies in the
1930s. This fictional fact enables them to re-process preceding information
and, with the aid of background historical knowledge, recognize several
previous instances of underreporting: Ono’s material circumstances
improve in the 1930s as a result of his political allegiances, his elder daughter feels impelled to advise that “precautionary steps” (Ishiguro 1987: 49)
should be taken during Noriko’s marriage negotiations because of Ono’s
compromising past, and Ono’s paintings are all “tidied away for the
moment” (32) presumably on account of their no longer desirable ideology.
Besides, the Migi-Hidari episode introduces the readers to the first conspicuous instance of the narrator’s misreading certain past circumstances
of his life. Ono’s interpretation of the authorities’ enthusiastic response to
the project of opening an establishment which pledges to be “a celebration
of the new patriotic spirit emerging in Japan today” (63) as a deferential
acknowledgement of his own growing influence is clearly misguided. As
the readers cannot but suspect that any such establishment would have
been warmly welcome owing to its customers’ political agenda, they are
also likely to conclude that Ono is a fallible commentator of his own life, at
least in the sense in which his (by now obvious, although unconvincingly
denied) infatuation with his social prestige and professional achievements
prevents him from interpreting past occurrences in other than self-congratulatory terms.
As successive layers of memory unfold in Ono’s narrative, the readers
are presented with further evidence that the protagonist’s account of himself is subjected to continuous adjustments intended to reconcile, if at all
possible, actual behaviour with an ideal of conduct which commands deference and admiration. Identified with hindsight, Ono’s repeated mis-
74
and/or underreporting concerning his former favourite pupil, Kuroda, and
the circumstances of their acquaintance and subsequent estrangement
point to a disguised but compelling urge to obliterate a pre-war episode
which the protagonist feels he cannot avow because of its incompatibility
with his notion of self-esteem. A similar impulse can be recognized behind
Ono’s rationalization of his sense of guilt over his past as a peculiar form of
manifestation of the generation gap: young people, like Setsuko’s husband
or Noriko’s former fiancé, “harbour such bitterness for [their] elders” (59)
and are ready to denounce their political allegiances, whereas the elders
themselves (among whom Ono and Matsuda, his ideological mentor from
the 1930s) hope, in the latter’s words, eventually “to see [their] li[ves’]
efforts vindicated” (94) and, by way of implication, warranted.
Later in the novel, on the occasion of Noriko’s miai (the formal meeting of the prospective spouses and their close families during traditional
Japanese marriage negotiations), the protagonist feels that circumstances
impress upon him the “prudence” (124) of making an unequivocal statement about his past ideological commitments. The Saitos mention the
acquaintanceship between Ono and Kuroda intending, very likely, nothing
further than to be casually polite, but Ono reads threatening undertones into
their reference to his former pupil, which prompts him to what he claims
(and, possibly, genuinely believes) to be an honest acknowledgement of
“responsibility for his past deeds” (124). However, when the confession is
actually made, the readers remain as mystified as the Saitos themselves as
to the true nature of some of the mistakes Ono blames himself for. Since the
protagonist avoids any reference to his denunciation of Kuroda to the police
and the latter’s subsequent imprisonment for political reasons (an episode
only to be recalled at the end of the third section of the novel) the conflict
between teacher and pupil — of which Ono supposes the Saitos to be
aware — is presented as only incurred because of irreconcilable differences in their respective views on art. In marked contrast with his obvious
(in retrospect) reluctance to admit guilt about an instance of particularly
reprehensible behaviour in his past, Ono appears to be surprisingly willing
to claim a general, diffuse culpability on account of the fact that
it is people like myself who are responsible for the terrible things that happened to this nation of ours […] mine was part of an influence that resulted in untold suffering for our own people (123).
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It is this last, and most cherished, of Ono’s self-portraits — reflecting
back to him the image of a man and artist who rose “above the mediocre”
(134) and made a decisive, if on occasion flawed, contribution to the history of his own times — that comes under suspicion and is ultimately refuted
in the concluding section the novel. After Ono’s denunciation of Kuroda is
revealed, several significant counterstatements enter his narrative, to the
effect that the readers are likely to locate the protagonist’s story considerably further towards the “unreliable” pole of an imaginary axis of reliability.
Taro Saito, now Noriko’s husband, politely declines to confirm that his
father, an outstanding art critic, had long been aware of Ono’s reputation as
a painter and wood-block printer, thus calling into question Ono’s own
opinion of his professional prestige. Setsuko denies having ever prompted
her father to take “precautionary steps” in the early stages of Noriko’s marriage negotiations, thereby pointing to the possibility that Ono has projected
his own unacknowledged worries and sense of guilt onto his daughter’s
thoughts. Moreover, in reply to her father’s claim that “I too was a man of
some influence, who used that influence towards a disastrous end” (193),
Setsuko remarks on the importance of seeing “things in a proper perspective” (193) which, in Ono’s case, appears to be that he was “simply a
painter” whose work “had hardly to do with these larger matters of which
we are speaking” (193). A most significant corroboration of this last point
comes from Matsuda who, shortly before his death, describes himself and
Ono as merely “ordinary men with no special gifts of insight” (200) whose
contribution to the history of their times “was always marginal” (201) and
therefore of little consequence to anybody else but themselves.
Whereas all homodiegetic narratives increase the difficulty of the readers’ ethical positioning (Phelan & Martin 1999), unreliable homodiegesis
tends to complicate matters still further, as any ethical response needs to be
cautious of the narrator’s deliberate or unintentional manipulating strategies. Throughout the four sections of An Artist of the Floating World, the
readers are invited to address the issue of loyalty — towards one’s artistic
mentor, towards one’s country and family and/or towards one’s self — but
they find themselves equally required to read through, and beyond, Ono’s
own assessment of his ethical decisions. About to leave his first apprenticeship place, the Takeda studio, Ono forcefully makes the point that “loyalty
has to be earned” (Ishiguro 1987: 72) and, in subsequent recollections of
the episode intended to benefit his own pupils, he expostulates on the les-
76
son that one is “never to follow the crowd blindly” but to consider carefully
one’s choices and “rise above the sway of things” (73). However, when the
pattern of artistic ‘betrayals’ multiplies in the novel (Sasaki betrays Morisan’s artistic principles and so does Ono, only later to find his own realist
painting creed betrayed by Kuroda), Ono becomes considerably more
inclined to empathize with the feelings of the ‘wronged’ master, for whom
“it is difficult to see any such maturing of talent as anything other than
treachery” (142).
Although individual readers are perhaps likely to hold conflicting views
as to how issues of loyalty and artistic freedom are to be settled in the novel,
they will have to make their ethical judgements with a full awareness of the
fact that Ono’s own are distinctly biased. The protagonist’s tolerant understanding of Mori-san’s rejection and sarcastic remarks, following his decision to abandon the Floating World school of painting, clearly appeals for
the readers’ tolerance towards Ono’s own rejection of Kuroda, subsequent
to the latter’s choice to no longer follow social-realist principles in his art.
Moreover, by juxtaposing the two accounts, Ono contrives (possibly subconsciously) to equate not only the two instances of artistic ‘betrayal’, but
also the respective responses to them. It is mainly with this other aspect that
the readers are likely to take issue, given that, in actual fact, the two characters act very differently on their feelings of disappointment. Whereas
Mori-san’s attitude probably remains regrettable but is not ultimately conducive to major harm, Ono’s decision to denounce Kuroda to the police
places him in an entirely different sphere of moral responsibility and personal guilt, as he deliberately allows a private matter to be settled, with dramatic consequences, by the brutal intervention of a repressive political
apparatus.
In case they are intent on exploring further the ethical dimension of the
novel, the readers may wish to pay closer attention to what appears to be
the protagonist’s own core moral concern, expressed with perhaps spurious assurance as “there is surely no great shame in mistakes made in the
best of faith” (125). The readers’ personal ethical beliefs are yet again likely
to interfere with their decision concerning whether or not blame should be
attached to an individual’s willingly becoming a propaganda artist when this
amounts to a principled option (and Ono’s words to Mori-san do seem to
indicate this is his case:
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
Sensei, it is my belief that in such troubled times as these, artists must
learn to value something more tangible than those pleasurable things that
disappear with the morning light. […] My conscience, Sensei, tells me I
cannot remain for ever an artist of the floating world (180)).
However, in view of Ono’s having turned his new artistic allegiances to
political ends (he agrees to serve on the arts committee of the State
Department at a time of governmental control of artistic expression) and
perhaps to personal advantage as well (he buys the Sugimura house after
his material circumstances have improved in the 1930s), the readers may
feel inclined to give less than full credit to the protagonist’s account of a
genuine and totally disinterested artistic conversion. Indeed, they may prefer to assume that Ono misreads once more the true rationale behind his
decisions, which might in fact be that, in Matsuda’s words, he “wanted so
badly to make a grand contribution” (199) and was prepared “to risk everything in the endeavour to rise above the mediocre” (204).
When read against the background of Ishiguro’s previous ‘Japanese’
novel, The Remains of the Day does appear as “an alternative English
‘remix’ […] of attitudes and situations present in An Artist of the Floating
World” (Lewis 2000: 133). Both novels foreground first person narrators
whose accounts of their lives are constantly hampered by failures of memory and self-flattering misrepresentations, and both elicit (and depend on)
the readers’ progressive awareness that the protagonists’ narratives are less
than entirely reliable. In each novel, the frequent misreadings, misreportings, displacements, and rationalizations to which Stevens and Ono tend to
be prone are likely to be recognized as resulting from their respective mistaken value systems — Stevens’ belief that the dignity of his profession is
incompatible with any display of personal emotions (Phelan & Martin 1999)
and Ono’s conviction that rising above mediocrity represents a worthy
achievement in and by itself. The ethical questions triggered by the two novels finely echo and mirror each other, and the core issue of whether one
can still justify one’s existence when it has been misguidedly devoted to fallacious ideals is raised either explicitly, in the concluding chapter of The
Remains of the Day, or as part of the unspoken mental background of Ono’s
reflections.
However, Ono’s moment of insight, unlike Stevens’ “anagnorisis”
(Phelan & Martin 1999: 106), ultimately fails to materialize: there is nothing
in An Artist of the Floating World comparable to the climactic Weymouth
78
episode from The Remains of the Day. At the end of his day, Ono does not
allow the signals coming from those around him to penetrate the protective
shield of his self-constructed image, nor is he prepared to let go of the conviction, impersonally phrased, “that one has achieved something of real
value and distinction” (Ishiguro 1987: 204) in life. In his own manner, Ono
needs the illusions of his private world as much as Gisaburo-san does, and
appears as willing to indulge in whatever game of self-delusion becomes
necessary for their preservation. As they grow increasingly aware of this
aspect, the readers may surmise, and indeed receive confirmation at the
end of the novel, that the particular form of unreliability exhibited by Ono’s
narrative will never be resolved into a final episode of crucial apprehension.
Unlike The Remains of the Day, where, “[a]s the trip has progressed […],
Stevens has gradually, albeit inconsistently, moved toward what we know”
and eventually “comprehends more about his situation than we are likely to
do in the “moment or two” he takes “to fully digest” Miss Kenton’s speech”
(Phelan & Martin 1999: 98-99), An Artist of the Floating World does not provide the readers with any definite confirmation, from within the text, of the
validity of their interpretative conjectures. The floating words of Ono’s selfdefinitions gather profusely, and sometimes painfully, but never solidify into
the fixture of a single authenticated fictional world.
References:
Booth, W. C. 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago & London: University of Chicago
Press.
Cohn, D. 2000. “Discordant Narration”, in Style 34/2, pp. 307-317.
Ishiguro, K. 1982. A Pale View of Hills. London: Faber & Faber.
Ishiguro, K. 1987 (1986). An Artist of the Floating World. London: Faber & Faber.
Ishiguro, K. 1999 (1999). The Remains of the Day. London: Faber & Faber.
Lewis, B. 2000. Kazuo Ishiguro. Manchester & New York: Manchester University
Press.
Phelan J., Martin M. P. 1999. “The Lessons of ‘Weymouth’: Homodiegess,
Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day”, in D. Herman (ed.).
Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State
Zerweck, B. 2001. “Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural
Discourse in Narrative Fiction”, in Style 35/1, pp. 151-178.
CANNIBALISED BODIES. MARGARET ATWOOD’S METAPHORS
OF TROUBLED IDENTITIES
ANDREEA ªERBAN
Abstract: The paper focuses on Margaret Atwood’s novels The Edible Woman,
Cat’s Eye, and Lady Oracle. It investigates the metaphors of cannibalism and
the role they play in the female protagonists’ reconsideration of their identities.
Cannibalism may essentially be described as an uncontrollable
hunger, which, similarly to vampirism, sets a boundary between prey and
predator, us and them. Cannibalism has been one of the essential features
used by Europeans in their representations of the colonized — the Other(s)
— who were frequently described as child-like or animal-like and presumed to eat the flesh of their own kind, i.e. other humans (Valsiner
2000:89-90). Images of cannibalism have been used ever since to demonize
those who are different culturally, racially, and even sexually.
If we are to consider cannibalism as a semiotic tool in establishing
relations and apply the ‘us-them’ criterion to contemporary society, then the
social Other would be the woman. As I have argued in a previous paper
(ªerban 2007a: 120-121), although women are fascinating, they have always
been considered inferior to men one way or another, and defined in relation to them, first the father and then the husband. Biological determinists
have claimed that biology grounds and justifies the social norms, i.e. men’s
superiority over women. In other words, the social differences between
men and women stem from the physiological differences.
In our consumerist society, women are trapped within and defined
through their bodies or in relation to men, they are objects of consumption,
characterized by passivity, emotions and dependency (on men) (Moi 2005:
15-21, 103) and, above all, by “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey 1975) — which
turns them into “bodies of desire” (Davis 2002:41) to be devoured by the
assessing and ranking male gaze. Having been attributed specific gender
roles by the patriarchal society, women are more important for what they
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inspire in the active and energetic men (Mulvey 1975), rather than through
themselves.
In terms of symbolic/ metaphorical cannibalism as consumption of
what is ‘other’, psychoanalysis offers a new insight into the matter. Freud
(1938: 563-564) discusses sexual intercourse in terms of a union which is
less than perfect since it does not lead to total satisfaction which may subsequently be obtained through fantasies of cannibalism — an expansion of
sexual interests to other parts of the body — suggesting a symbolic swallowing of the other to make up the (mythical androgynous) whole. Sceats
(2000: 34), too, defines cannibalism as “an extreme desire to devour” the
loved one, to incorporate him/ her, and as “a lust for total possession” in an
attempt of achieving “the mythical state of oneness”. Incorporation is, however, ambivalent: union is indeed achieved, but the gratification of desire
leads to the destruction of the object. It can, therefore, be argued that cannibalism has associations of dismemberment or fragmentation, since the
object can never be restored to its original shape.
Atwood’s Cannibals
Cannibalism, as well as the related myth of vampirism (in its reading
as absorption of vital energies), relies on becoming stronger by literally or
metaphorically consuming the others. If one’s body is cannibalized/ vampirized, i.e. fragmented, the power and energy of the individual are also fragmented. In Margaret Atwood’s novels, cannibalism, as well as vampirism,
prevail in their symbolic meanings and play an important role in terms of
power relations between the characters. All Atwood’s protagonists are initially fragmented, victimized, cannibalized, but they gradually transform into
stronger individuals through eating — becoming predators — or metaphorical touching (writing/ narrating or painting). In other words, edible victims
become inedible consumers.
In the society of Atwood’s novels, it is the laws of nature that apply in
terms of power relations, namely ‘eat or be eaten’, where the prey is the
social other. In this respect, I have identified three types of metaphorical
cannibalism which are illustrated in the three novels under discussion: hetero-cannibalism (different sex — i.e. male — predators), in which case the
cannibals are men, who fragment women’s bodies by imposing on them
stereotypes of femininity or what they consider to be ‘healthy eating’ — The
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
Edible Woman (1978) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1993); homo-cannibalism
(same sex — i.e. female — predators), with women causing the dismemberment or amputation of other women’s bodies by perpetrating the patriarchal stereotypes of femininity, as in Lady Oracle (1977), for example; and
finally, self-cannibalism, where women act as cannibals against themselves
in their attempt to cope with a harsh reality, as in Cat’s Eye (1989). In what
follows, I will discuss these types of symbolic cannibalism with special
emphasis on the body parts that suggest fragmentation, amputation, dismemberment, erasure of identity. As Wilson (2005: 122) also remarks,
Atwood’s protagonists symbolically lose sensory organs such as mouths,
tongues, hearts, hands, feet, or eyes only to become stronger individuals in
the end with new voices, visions and ways of touching of their own.
Women’s cannibalization or, in other words, the amputation of their
identities is primarily suggested through images of mouths and teeth, and
speech implicitly. Marian, the protagonist of The Edible Woman (1978),
seems mouthless in the sense that we never hear her agree to Peter’s marriage proposal. Moreover, she has a rather feeble voice since the second
and largest part of her story is narrated in third person singular (as opposed
to the first and third part of the novel which are first person narrations), suggesting the distance Marian takes both from herself and from society. Elaine
Risley (Cat’s Eye, 1989) becomes the victim of the girl-friends she has
longed for when she travelled through the wilderness with her brother and
parents and, even though they torment her and continually try to regulate
her appearance and behaviour by constantly criticizing her, she cannot
bring herself to talk about her victimization. Desperately wanting the girls’
approval and affection, but having been labeled as “wrong”, “sinful” and
“heathen”, Elaine resorts to self-cannibalism, using her teeth to tear off the
skin from her heels, to chew her hair or nibble at her fingernails in an
attempt to preserve her integrity and sanity, which seem to be dissolving.
In the endless time when Cordelia had such power over me, I peeled
the skin off my feet. […] I would begin with the big toes. I would bend my
foot up and bite a small opening in the thickest part of the skin, on the bottom, along the outside edge. Then, with my fingernails, which I never bit
because why bite something that didn’t hurt, I would pull the skin off in narrow strips. […] The pain gave me something definite to think about, something immediate. It was something to hold on to. I chewed the ends of my
82
hair […]. I gnawed the cuticles off from around my fingernails, leaving
exposed, oozing flesh which would harden into rinds and scale off (Atwood
1989: 120, my emphases).
Similarly, Joan Foster, the protagonist of Lady Oracle’s (1977) , cannot
bring herself to talk about her multiple identities (fat unpopular child, lover,
poetess, popular gothic writer, assumed terrorist) to her husband. She only
informs him about her poetry volume when the book is under print and only
in the end of the novel does she take the decision of letting him know about
her writing gothic romances. Throughout the novel, her motivating force
seems to be fear (Howells 2005: 58) of being found out, of people discovering the truth about her fat childhood self, about her writing both poetry and
popular gothic fiction. But unlike Elaine, Joan falls victim to homo-cannibalism, with her mother (embodying society, the ‘others’) trying to inflict society’s ideals of femininity on her daughter and control her body through eating, through what goes into Joan’s mouth. Desperate for her mother’s love
and unable to obtain her approval, Joan begins to eat out of panic and her
body swells like dough. Eating becomes not only a form of self-mutilation,
a paradoxical self-cannibalism and erasure of one’s identity through
deforming flesh, but also a valuable weapon against her unloving mother:
“I ate to defy her, but I also ate from panic. Sometimes I was afraid I wasn’t
really there, I was an accident; I’d heard her call me an accident” (Atwood
1977: 78, my emphases).
As a child, Joan is often invited to watch her mother put on make-up,
a ritual she secretly enjoys.
In the image of her that I carried for years, hanging from my neck like an
iron locket, she was sitting in front of her vanity table, painting her fingernails a murderous red and sighing. Her lips were thin but she made a larger mouth with lipstick over and around them […], which gave her a curious double mouth […] (Atwood 1977: 65, my emphases).
The mother’s double mouth, which she creates with red lipstick, as
well as her red fingernails, vividly remind us of cannibals’ blood-dripping
mouths or blood-thirsty vampires who have recently fed themselves on
human victims to acquire their powers and assert their own control.
Looking forward to escaping her authoritarian mother, Joan gives in to society’s indoctrinating models of femininity and, stimulated by Aunt Lou’s
inheritance, she loses weight much to her mother’s spite, who feels her
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control diminishing. Even though Joan has rejected beauty stereotypes as a
fat child and teenager, she has internalized her mother’s control and ideology, and will remain their victim throughout her adult life as a slim woman.
In order to reconsider her situation, the mature and slender Joan
stages her death and leaves for Europe. With the mock suicide, she almost
succeeds in completely erasing at least one of her multiple identities (that
of Joan Foster), but will have to return to Canada to save her ‘accomplice’
friends from prison. In Italy, after she dances on shattered glass, symbolic of
her split selves, and gets her feet minced, Joan decides to try to reconcile
her multiple identities and tell her husband about her writings so that she
may live without fear of being discovered.
Just like adult Elaine of Cat’s Eye, whose speech is controlled by her
lover Josef, who tells her when to speak and when to keep quiet, trying in
this way to assert his power and control over her, Marian MacAlpin from The
Edible Woman succumbs to Peter’s authority and does not have a say even
in what concerns her appearance. After the engagement, Peter flaunts
Marian in front of his friends and colleagues, and wants her to change her
hairdo and buy more feminine clothes instead of the greyish ones she usually wears as a sort of camouflage to pass unnoticed. This only emphasizes
once more Marian’s being an object of consumption, a doll-like creature
with no will (or mind) of her own:
Peter had suggested that she might have something done with her hair. He
also hinted that perhaps she should buy a dress that was, as he put it, “not
so mousy” as any she already owned […] she could smell the sweetly-artificial perfume of the hairspray he had used to glue each strand in place.
[…] They treated your head like a cake: something to be carefully iced and
ornamented (Atwood 1978: 216-217, my emphases).
Eating and teeth denote a voracious appetite and Atwood uses such
images to overlap physical and sexual appetites. Thus Arthur (Lady Oracle,
1977) grinds his teeth during sexual intercourse, while Peter has “teeth-gritting moods” (Atwood 1978: 61), bites Marian’s shoulder during sex and finds
her perfume appetizing. He also enjoys kissing her on the neck, a very vulnerable place, which reminds us again of blood-thirsty vampires and which
transforms Peter into a blood-sucking creature, highlighting his need to feel
in control (especially of Marian’s body): “Inside, Peter took off her coat for
her. He put his hands on her bare shoulders and kissed her lightly on the
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back of the neck. ‘Yum yum’ he said, ‘new perfume’” (Atwood 1978: 237, my
emphases).
With respect to hetero-cannibalism as dismemberment, Atwood
draws a parallel between courting and hunting with a focus on the predatory aspect of both rituals. In the restaurant scene before the marriage proposal, Peter describes his hunting and gutting of a she-rabbit.
So I let her off and Wham. One shot, right through the heart. […] I picked
it up and Trigger said, ‘You know how to gut them, you just slit her down
the belly and give her a good shake and all the guts’ll fall out’. […] A group
of friends […] were gathered around him, their faces clearly visible in the
sunlight […] splashed with blood, the mouths wrenched with laughter. I
couldn’t see the rabbit”. (Atwood 1978: 65-66, my emphases).
Marian identifies with the rabbit, subconsciously feeling trapped and in
danger of being split in halves. This sensation of having her body dismembered and cannibalized grows in intensity even more as she has dreamt
about her body dissolving, “turning transparent” (Atwood 1978: 38) and vanishing into thin air as an indication of her own identity being amputated by
Peter’s authority and wishes. When Marian offers Peter a heart-shaped cake
as a belated Valentine gift, he devours it voraciously. If we consider the pink
cake a symbol of Marian’s own heart, then Peter is nothing but a hetero-cannibal who absorbs his fiancée’s vital energy and gains more and more
power over her.
The day before had been Valentine’s Day and Peter had sent her a dozen
roses. She had felt guilty, thinking she ought to have given him something
but no knowing what. […] It was a heart with pink icing and probably
stale, but it was the shape that mattered. […] She shuddered and spat the
cake […]. ‘I really worked up an appetite’, he has said, grinning at her
(Atwood 1978: 215-216, my emphases).
While Marian’s body begins to have a will of its own and reject food,
Peter has no such problems and metaphorically devours the heart-shaped
cake in a possible attempt to incorporate Marian and achieve the perfect
union Freud (1938: 563-564) was referring to, which will only enable him to
assert his will and better control her.
Atwood’s protagonists’ search for selfhood is — as Parker (1995: 349)
points out — usually accompanied by a search for food or by eating itself.
While Marian’s (The Edible Woman) body gradually rejects food, Joan
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
(Lady Oracle) takes her decisions at the table while eating junk food, Elaine
(Cat’s Eye) abuses her body with a poor diet. It is through food association
and eating that the protagonist of The Edible Woman also takes her life into
her own hands. Finally acknowledging her victim position, Marian rejects it
and bakes a woman-shaped cake to serve her fiancé. The cake thus stands
for artificial womanhood, a substitute victim for Marian. When Peter refuses to eat it, she incorporates it herself in an act of self-cannibalism, regaining control over her own body and asserting a new identity as a stronger
woman who has rejected the stereotypes of femininity that society in general and Peter in particular have sought to impose on her. In an analogous
way, Joan Foster’s (Lady Oracle) attempt to take control and assume
responsibility over her life is accompanied by eating: “I sat at the white table
with my hot cup, adding another white ring to the varnish, eating a package
of rusks and trying to organize my life” (Atwood 1977: 21).
As we have seen so far, Atwood’s protagonists learn the lesson of
assertiveness through consumption. No longer consenting to their cannibalization, they turn from prey to predators. Nevertheless, apart from the powerful images of eating, mouth and teeth discussed above, another way of
amputating or dismembering women’s identities is through images of eyes
and seeing.
Being primarily sensory organs, the eyes are the ones that establish a
direct contact with the viewer and with the world in general. Through the
eyes, a person witnesses and learns about the world. If we link seeing to
knowing which, in its turn, suggests power, then Atwood’s handmaids of
The Handmaid’s Tale (1993) are the epitome of women as objects of consumption, symbolically cannibalized by men’s devouring gaze. As I have
argued elsewhere (ªerban 2006: 110), handmaids are under constant monitoring by male eyes — even the spies of Gilead are suggestively called Eyes
— and have their identities deleted on several levels. They have no name of
their own, but a combination of the possessive particle ‘of’ and the name of
the commander they service, they have to look up at men in authority, but
are looked down on as women whose only purpose is to bear the commander’s child. Furthermore, the symbol of the Giledean extremely patriarchal
state is tattooed on their ankles, mirrors are denied to them — an essential
element in establishing one’s identity — and even speech is strictly controlled, as handmaids can only utter fixed set phrases devoid of emotions.
86
Atwood makes use of the mirror as a symbol of split identities in Lady
Oracle (1977), with reference to surface and depth images of the same
character. Bearing in mind that the eyes are gateways to one’s soul (Nanu
2001: 94), staring in the mirror induces a hallucinatory state in which the
soul seems to exit the body and get in touch with the other world. During
such trances in-between dream and reality, the protagonist Joan practices
automatic writing; in other words, travelling through the mirror establishes
the connection with inspiration or the creative subconscious.
Simultaneously, the mirror is indicative of Joan Foster’s multiple identities,
in particular of her real name and of the pennames she uses for her writings: she is Lady Oracle as a poetess and Louisa K. Délacourt (her aunt’s
name) for her gothic romances.
Similarly to Offred the handmaid, who initially colludes in her fragmentation — blinding and gagging — the protagonist of Cat’s Eye (1989) has her
speech controlled by her first lover and art teacher Josef, who tells her
when to speak and when to keep quiet, and who delights in rearranging her
in order to match his own ideal of the beautiful female body, completely
submissive and complying with the norms of patriarchy.
Josef is rearranging me. […] He places me against the twilight of the window, turns me, stands back a little, running his hand up and down my side.
[…] But I catch a glimpse of myself, without expecting it, in the smokedmirror wall of the elevator as we go up, and I see for an instant what Josef
sees: a slim woman with cloudy hair, pensive eyes in a thin white face. I
recognize the style: late nineteenth century. Pre-Raphaelite. I should be
holding a poppy (Atwood 1989: 323-324, my emphases).
The reflection Elaine glimpses in the mirror is nothing more than a
mask, an image imposed on her by male stereotypes of the female body,
highlighting once more Elaine’s fragmentation and erasure of her true self.
Moreover, through its ability to induce sleep and hallucinations, the poppy
she thinks she should be holding brings about connotations of sleep walking, manipulation, and even death (through its red, bloodlike colouring).
If the handmaids (Atwood 1993) are under constant surveillance by
male eyes, the Cat’s Eye protagonist is closely watched by women-to-be
who have internalized the patriarchal norms. As a young girl, Elaine Risley
is put under a ‘magnifying glass’ by her so-called friends, whom she had so
much longed for when she was in the wilderness. Grace, Carol and
Cordelia gradually turn into Elaine’s tormentors, constantly criticizing her
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appearance and behaviour and absorbing her vital energies. Having settled
in the city due to her father’s profession as a biologist, Elaine has to “camouflage” herself (Culpeper 1989) by adopting girls’ clothes and girly manners in order to survive in this ‘new wilderness’, where the rules are made
by men, and obeyed and enforced by such women as Mrs. Smeath. Brought
up in a patriarchal society with certain ideals about the female body and
behaviour, the three girls only apply these internalized stereotypes.
However, Elaine’s self-cannibalization as an attempt to preserve her
sanity goes beyond the physical level of shredding, fragmenting herself —
as we have already seen — and she loses her emotions as well. The cat’s
eye marble that Elaine considers to be her protective charm seems to enter
her body after her first descent into the ravine. She now assumes what
Wilson (2005: 304) calls “cat’s eye vision”, in the sense that she no longer
allows the others’ opinions of her as guidelines in life. As argued elsewhere
(ªerban 2007b: 80-81), this is the moment when Elaine begins to grow
stronger as an individual and exchanges power roles with Cordelia who
will, however, haunt her throughout her life and whom she will always consider as her Other, her own reflection in the mirror. The mirror — reflecting
a distorted or a fragmented image of things — connects Elaine’s outer
search for Cordelia with her inner search for selfhood. Remembering her
past and succeeding in removing the glass from her eye — once she finds
the cat’s eye marble in the basement of her parents’ house — Elaine can
finally rid herself of the ghosts of the past and regain emotions by learning
to forgive. It is her artistic vision that finally helps her re-assert her identity
as a stronger woman, no longer cannibalized or fragmented. The painting
of the Virgin of Lost Things holding a huge cat’s eye marble is then, possibly, the best illustration of both the protagonist’s symbolic amputation and
loss of emotion, and of her ability to finally learn to use the others’ ‘visions’
of her to transform herself.
If in the beginning, all of Atwood’s protagonists are edible prey, lacking
such body parts as mouths (and implicitly speech) or eyes (and implicitly
sight), they finally transform themselves and by rejecting their victim positions, they re-assert their identities as stronger individuals — they become
predators, i.e. inedible consumers — with a voice and a vision of their own.
88
References
Atwood, M. 1977 (1976). Lady Oracle. Toronto: Seal Books.
Atwood, M. 1978 (1969). The Edible Woman. Toronto: Seal Books and McClellandBantam.
Atwood, M. 1989 (1988). Cat’s Eye. Toronto: Seal Books.
Atwood, M. 1993 (1985). The Handmaid’s Tale. Oxford and London: Heinemann
New Windmill.
Culpeper, R. 1989. Recogntion and Rejection of Victimization in the Novels of
Margaret Atwood. [Online]. Available: http://my.tbaytel.net/culpeper/
RecognitionAndRejectionOfVictimizationInTheNovelsOfMargaretAtwood.html
#Power_Patterns_Rituals_and_Values.
Davis, L.J. 1995. “Visualising the Disabled Body: The Classical Nude and the
Fragmented Torso”, in V.B. Leitch (ed.). 2002. Seminar on Body Studies. A
Reader (pp. 34-50). Ph.D. Program, English and American Studies, University of
Debrecen.
Freud, S. 1938. “Three: Contributions to the Theory of Sex”, in The Basic Writings of
Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by A. A. Brill. New York: Modern Library.
[Online]. Available: www.questia.com.
Howells, C.A. 2005. Margaret Atwood. Second edition. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Moi, T. 2005. Sex, Gender and the Body. The student edition of What is a Woman?
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mulvey, L. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. [Online]. Available:
http://www.panix.com/˜squigle/vcs/mulvey-vpnc.html.
Nanu, A. 2001. Arta pe om. Look-ul ºi înþelesul semnelor vestimentare. Sibiu:
Compania.
Parker, E. 1995. "You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of
Margaret Atwood", in Twentieth Century Literature. Volume: 41. Issue: 3. Page
Number: 349+. [Online]. Available: www.questia.com.
Sceats, S. 2000. Food, Consumption, and the Body in Contemporary Women's
Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ªerban, A. 2006. "Eye Representations in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
and Sarah Hall's The Electric Michelangelo", in Dascãl, R. (Ed.). Gender
Studies, vol.1, No.5/ 2006. Timiºoara: Editura Universitãþii de Vest, pp. 105-111.
ªerban, A. 2007a. "The Fascination of the Female Body", in Dascãl, R. (Ed.). Gender
Studies, vol. 1, No. 6/2007. Timiºoara: Editura Universitãþii de Vest, pp. 119-128.
ªerban, A. 2007b. "The Magic of the Eye. Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye", in Pârlog, H.
(Ed.). British and American Studies. Timiºoara: Editura Universitãþii de Vest,
pp. 77-86.
Valsiner, J. 2000. "Social Consumption of Cannibals", in Culture and Psychology, vol.
6, pp. 88-96 available [online]: http://cap.sagepub.com.
Wilson, S.R. 2005. Margaret Atwood's Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi.
TWO INSTANCES OF THE FRAGMENTARY
IN THE POSTMODERN NOVEL: ITALO CALVINO’S IF ON A
WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER AND ANNIE PROULX’S
THE SHIPPING NEWS
ANDREEA TEREZA NIÞIªOR
University of Iaºi
Abstract: The paper examines fragmentariness in terms of (subversive)
narrative and narratological strategies, thematic material, style, theoretical
assumptions, and ideological implications in two very different novels - Italo
Calvino’s “hypernovel” If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) and Annie
Proulx’s The Shipping News (1993).
An impressive number of scholarly studies on the fragment, published
fairly recently, have revived interest in these fertile yet problematic and elusive topics. Traditionally treated as part of a whole, as remnant, debris,
incomplete or “unfinished” text (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988: 42,
Harter 1996: 124, Nochlin 2001: 56, etc.), the fragment has undergone a postmodernist re-evaluation. Abandoning the restrictive connotations of its etymology, some scholars analysed the fragment for its own sake, for its intrinsic value, focusing on the fragment as “a determinate and deliberate statement, assuming or transfiguring the accidental and involuntary aspects of
fragmentation” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988: 41). Consequently, the
fragment has come under scrutiny from a double perspective: as part of a
whole — whether lost, extant, or planned — and as non-subordinated (or
insubordinate) to a whole — the fragment proper.
Thus, in Lire les formes brèves, in the chapter dedicated to fragmentary forms, Bernard Roukhomovsky (2005: 89-109) opens his analysis with
the romantic distinction between the fragment-ruin (fragment-débris) and
the fragment-project to proceed to an investigation of l’écriture fragmentaire that includes the essay, the note, the sketch, the draft, autobiography,
memoirs (formes du moi), and Pascal Quignard’s “small” treatises, identifying an ordre fragmentaire. Roukhomovsky (2005: 94) traces both the essay
90
tradition and the practice of “broken” writing (écriture brisée) back to
Montaigne, whose Essays he sees as un nœud complexe, an assortment of
articles décousus, fragments of a discourse which ne peut se dire à la fois et
en bloc. Montaigne articulates a dynamics of textual proliferation by means
of successive additions and expansions (aditions et gonflements), which he
termed allongeails and farcissures. According to Roukhomovsky, the peculiarity of this “dispositif”
qui associe le bref et le prolixe, la fugacité du coup de sonde et la multiplication des coups d’essai, tient non seulement à la conception même du
discours essayiste, mais également à la texture de l’objet qu’il s’assigne ...
En d’autres termes, cette infinie diversité d’approches et d’éclairages qui
constitue l’écriture essayiste en un dispositif optique répond à la structure
même de son objet (2005: 96-97).
Roukhomovsky extends the correlation between fragmentary form
and composite or broken texture of the content to a relationship of consubstantiality between the writing and the fractured self, idea acknowledged by
Montaigne himself: “Je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre”; “Je n’ai
pas plus fait mon livre que mon livre m’a fait, livre consubstantiel à son
auteur” (qtd. in Roukhomovsky 2005: 94). The author of Lire les formes
brèves identifies the same type of intrinsic motivation for the fragmentary
form in Blaise Pascal, who spoke about an ordre du cœur — discontinuous,
repetitive, and incantatory — and an ordre de l’esprit — linear, deductive,
and discursive, two divergent forces whose tension gives birth to what
Roukhomovsky calls l’ordre fragmentaire (2005: 100-101), perfectly exemplified by Pensées. “Car il y a chez Pascal”, notes Roukhomovsky, “un veritge — et d’ailleurs un imaginaire — de la dislocation” (2005: 103), and this
imaginary of dislocation will become paramount in Laurence Sterne, in
Romanticism, in the majority of modernist and postmodernist writers.
Many postmodernist authors either write fragments as parts of a theoretical discourse, or elaborate fragmentary fictions contributing to the development of a theory of the fragment, or produce fragmentary theories which
“can be enacted in and as fragments” (Elias 2004: 22). Although insightful,
Camelia Elias’s recent study The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics
of a Performative Genre does not deal with fragmentariness as a key-concept and discursive formula in postmodernist theory and, like all other theoretical works on the fragment published so far, does not even mention
writers such as Italo Calvino, Fernando Pessoa, or Annie Proulx.
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
What Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy called l’exigence fragmentaire
(1988: 39-58) — concept appropriated from Maurice Blanchot —, indicating
“a persistent unsettling of intellectual and artistic territories and ideological
positions — even of freedom itself” (Strathman 2006: 31), and which the
two philosophers perceived as one of the distinctive features of the German
Romanticism, becomes the trademark of postmodernist theory and literature. Thus, in “Towards a Concept of Postmodernism”, Ihab Hassan argues
that “postmodernism veers toward open, playful, optative, provisional
(open in time as well as in structure or space), disjunctive, or indeterminate
forms, a discourse of irony and fragments, a ‘white ideology’ of absences
and fractures, a desire of diffractions, and invocation of complex, articulate
silences” (1993: 154).
In a similar vein, though with a different end in mind, David Lodge lists
five strategies — contradiction, discontinuity, randomness, excess, and
short circuit — by which postmodernist writing seeks to elude the choice of
one of the two poles of metaphoric (modernist) or metonymic (antimodernist) writing (McHale 2003: 7). The common denominator of all theories
of postmodernism, which sometimes border on cultural paranoia, is the resituating, re-examining of the notions of reality, self, individuality, and identity in terms of fragmentation, dissipation, and even dissolution.
From an ideological standpoint, the proliferation of narratologies —
Formalism, Marxism, Reception Theory, Deconstruction, New Historicism,
Postcolonialism, etc. — prompts Mark Currie to conclude that “Jakobson’s
structuralist dream of a global science of literature has yielded to an uncontrolled fracturing of the narratological method” (Currie 1998:14). Under
these circumstances, fragmentariness as transgressive notion permeating
and, at the same time, providing the basis of all types of discourse — critical, literary, philosophical, cinematic, cultural, etc. — may be hailed as the
true “postmodern condition”.
Apart from the ubiquity of the fragment in postmodernist theory, what
has remained largely unexplored is the fragment as narrative, fictional, or
cinematic topos and/or strategy. This is all the more surprising since a novel
such as Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler fully exploits the
potential of fragmentariness as narrative strategy, while Annie Proulx, in The
Shipping News, takes to an extreme the use of l’écriture brisée in a fragmented narrative teeming with lacunae, turning fragmentariness into a
trademark of her style.
92
As self-confessed intention, narrative mechanism and subversive strategy in Calvino’s postmodern metanovel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
(1979), the fragmentary destabilizes (parodies) the narrative construction of
a unitary-finite type, i.e. the novel characterised by continuity, coherence,
and closure. At the same time, the proliferation of narrative fragments and
loose threads mystifies the reader. The narrator himself draws attention to
“how much the word contains and conceals: “you cut your way through
your reading as if through a dense forest” (Calvino 1993: 40).
Fragmentariness frustrates the readers’ expectations (both intradiegetically
— the Reader as protagonist — and extradiegetically — the real reader), as
the narrator casually points out by means of an ironic metanarrative observation: “here is a trap-novel designed (…) with beginnings of novels that
remain suspended” (Calvino 1993: 122).
Consequently, fragmentariness works here on the two levels (or
“poles”) identified by Iser in The Reading Process: A Phenomenological
Approach (1972), namely the “artistic” and the “esthetic”. In Iser’s view
the artistic refers to the text created by the author, and the esthetic to the
realization [Konkretisation] accomplished by the reader. From this polarity it follows that the literary work cannot be completely identical with the
text, or with the realization of the text, but in fact must lie halfway between
the two (1972: 105).
Thus, at first glance, fragmentariness at the “artistic” level is achieved
by means of an intricate pattern of suspended incipits embedded in the
frame story of the Reader caught up in an impossible quest for the missing
narrative fragments. At the “esthetic” level, that of the “realization” of the
text effected by the reader, fragmentariness appears as an inherent feature
of the reading process, as it depends on time and is subject to interferences
and intrusions from the world outside the book, a fact duly noted by one of
the anonymous reader-characters in the novel: “Reading is a discontinuous
and fragmentary operation” (Calvino 1993: 248). At a closer look, however,
the choice of narrative fragmentariness appears motivated by both the parodic key in which the text is written and the postmodernist mélange of fiction and narratology. Calvino’s novel becomes a metanovel, a compendium
on how to write novels and an accurate description of the act of reading, in
other words of the “reception” process, highlighting the open tension
between the “artistic” and the “esthetic”: “In reading, something happens
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
over which I have no power”, confesses the writer-character Silas Flannery
(Calvino 1993: 234).
If parody, metatextuality (self-referentiality) and intertextuality are the
“grounds” for understanding fragmentariness in Calvino, pseudo-realism
and paratextuality are the “keys” for interpreting Annie Proulx’s fragmentary
novel. Perhaps one of the most disconcerting and highly unusual paratextual features of The Shipping News (1993) is the (mock-)disclaimer written in
small print on the copyright page:
This is a work of fiction. No resemblance is intended to living or dead persons, extant or failed newspapers, real government departments, specific
towns or villages, actual roads or highways. The skiffs, trawlers and yachts,
the upholstery needle, the logans, thumbies, and plates of cod cheeks, the
bakeapples and those who pick them, the fish traps, the cats and the dogs,
the houses and seabirds described here are all fancies. The
Newfoundland in this book, though slated with grains of truth, is an island
of invention (Proulx 2002: iv).
The paratext of Proulx’s “work of fiction” offers vital information for the
reception process at the same time providing a useful insight into the novelist’s unique style. The title page features an apparently cryptic illustration
of a coil of rope, whose meaning becomes somewhat clearer when the
reader proceeds to the motto page, right after the dedication page. The
motto is taken from The Ashley Book of Knots (1944):
“In a knot of eight crossings, which is about the average-size knot, there
are 256 different ‘over-and-under’ arrangements possible.… Make only
one change in this ‘over-and-under’ sequence and either an entirely different knot is made or no knot at all may result” (Proulx 2002: vii).
Puzzling as it may be, the motto is semantically related to the title, The
Shipping News, and to the illustration. Moreover, at least to a more “experienced” reader (such as Ludmilla from If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler), it
tells a cautionary tale of possible “arrangements”, i.e. of an ars combinatoria that should not be randomly made; on the contrary, there is only one
particular “sequence” that is necessary in order to make the desired “knot”.
The meaning of this motto unravels itself gradually, in the process of reading. As Varvogli puts it (2002: 71), the epigraph speaks of narrative strands,
permutations and variations, and in so doing it paints a picture of the book
it introduces. It warns the readers that this will be a story made up of frag-
94
ments which have to be arranged in a certain manner, but which could
equally be rearranged in order to produce different versions of the story.
The next unusual paratextual element is the Acknowledgments page,
which is not a standard feature of fiction books. The manner in which
Proulx’s gratitude is expressed is no less unusual: “The Newfoundland wit
and taste for conversation made the most casual encounters a pleasure”;
“Canadian Coast Guard Search and Rescue personnel, the staff of the
Northern Pen in St. Anthony, fishermen and loggers, the Atmospheric
Environment Service of Environment Canada all told me how things
worked”; “Walter Punch of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society Library
confirmed some obscure horticultural references” (Proulx 2002: ix-x). Not
surprisingly, Aliki Varvogli notes that “the excessive and meticulous listing of
so many people who helped the author with her research verges on parody” (Varvogli 2002: 14). Varvogli goes on to contend that a possible explanation of Proulx’s “extensive credits” is that they “are meant to suggest that no
amount of factual information can fully account for the genesis of a work of
art. Given that these extensive lists appear in the beginning of the book,
Proulx should perhaps be understood as a magician who reveals the secrets
of her art, and then goes on to trick the reader all the same (14).
Another explanation might be a playful shredding of the illusion réaliste by means of an overwhelming accumulation of realistic details reaching a saturation point, thus triggering an attitude of disbelief. As Calvino in If
on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Proulx “bares the device”, but she chooses
a different strategy: paratextual instead of meta- and intertextual.
Parody is a key-element both novels share and the highly original
opening of each is a significant clue in this respect. Calvino’s novel features
a frame story, narrated in the second person, the protagonist being none
other than the Reader himself, farcically addressed in the famous metaincipit of the book: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel,
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other
thought” (1993: 3). By emphatically “laying bare the device”, the novel
flaunts its own artfulness, and becomes a vivid example of how “the realisation of the form constitutes the content of the work” (Harland 1999:151).
From this viewpoint, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a postmodernist
metafiction — or, “theoretical fiction” in Mark Currie’s terminology (Currie
1998: 52-53). By conveying an uncanny feeling of unheimlich familiarity in
the real readers of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, who begin reading the
95
“POST”-DILEMMAS
story of a fictional Reader who begins reading If on a Winter’s Night a
Traveler, Calvino’s novel successfully stages “a confrontation between the
world of the text and our own” (Butler 2002: 70), thus enacting “a disturbingly sceptical triumph over our sense of reality” (Butler 2002: 70). Calvino himself said that his original intention was to write “a book in which the reader
would not be reading the text of a novel but a description of the act of reading per se” (du Plessix Gray 1981: 22).
The opening of The Shipping News is no less peculiar. Chapter I, entitled Quoyle, features two epigraphs: the former explains the title —
“Quoyle: A coil of rope” — while the latter, taken from The Ashley Book of
Knots, is a bit more mystifying, at least at first sight — “A Flemish flake is a
spiral coil of one layer only. It is made on deck, so that it may be walked on
if necessary” (Proulx 2002: 3). The first four paragraphs of the novel, less
than half a page, encapsulate thirty-six years of the protagonist’s life in a
hundred and thirty-six words:
Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn
and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.
Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he survived childhood; at
the state university, hand clapped over his chin, he camouflaged torment
with smiles and silence. Stumbled through his twenties and into his thirties learning to separate his feelings from his life, counting on nothing. He
ate prodigiously, liked a ham knuckle, buttered spuds.
His jobs: distributor of vending machine candy, all-night clerk in a convenience store, a third-rate newspaperman. At thirty-six, bereft, brimming
with grief and thwarted love, Quoyle steered away to Newfoundland, the
rock that had generated his ancestors, a place he had never been nor
thought to go (Proulx 2002: 3-4).
This atypical narrative gambit, introducing the protagonist as a “slightly grotesque” (Varvogli 2002: 33) anti-hero, relies on both conventional techniques — third-person (heterodigetic) narrative, omniscient narrator — and
unconventional discursive strategies, namely, 1) elliptical information
imparted matter-of-fact-ly, 2) structural irony, noticeable especially in the
relation between the paratext and the main body of the text (for instance,
the coil of rope that “may be walked on if necessary”, described in the second epigraph is a metaphor for Quoyle, who is indeed walked on for the
most part of the novel), and 3) what Ian Watt calls delayed decoding (qtd.
96
in Varvogli 2002: 20) - showing the effects before mentioning the cause.
“Delayed decoding”, Varvogli explains, „is also an indication of the fact that
the author has control over her creation, and chooses to manipulate her
material in such a way as to suggest that characters’ lives are unfolding in
front of our eyes, when the truth is that their fate had been decided before
the author began to write” (Varvogli 2002: 20).
Laconic information and the “syncopated language” (Varvogli 2002:
35) bestow a fragmentary quality on the narrative, fragmentariness which is
reinforced both in terms of temporal shifts and abrupt dislocations, and in
terms of characters. Quoyle is essentially a fragmentary man (his father’s
“failure”, short-term husband, father, widower, orphan) who “abstracted his
life from the times” (Proulx 2002: 15), whose “earliest sense of self was as
a distant figure” (4), and who gets into the habit of condensing his life and
impressions of others in deprecatory headlines: “Man Dies of Broken Heart”
(21); “Stupid Man Does Wrong Thing Once More” (106); “Man Sounds Like
Fatuous Fool” (137); “Newspaper Reporter Seems Magnet for Dead Men”
(249); “Man Escapes Endless Song” (368). As Varvogli points out “Quoyle,
like the reader, is an outsider, and just as he only gradually understands the
import of other people’s stories, and the extent of his relations to the world,
so the narrative reveals itself to the reader in enigmatic fragments that have
to be pieced together” (Varvogli 2002: 42-43).
“Enigmatic fragments” also constitute the core of Calvino’s convoluted
novel — “we cannot love or think except in fragments of time” (Calvino
1993: 8), remarks the narrator in Chapter One. These chapters perform multiple functions with multiple theoretical implications. From the first paratextual elements, Calvino’s novel appears unusual and baffling. The “Contents”
are positioned before “Chapter One” and inform the real readers of the existence of twelve numbered chapters and ten intercalated titled “chapters”,
which turn out to be ten embedded fragment-stories written in ten different
styles and belonging to ten different literary forms and genres, including a
mystery, a Bildungsroman in the realist tradition and rich in sensory details
reminiscent of Proust, a mock literary biography, a war story doubled by a
tangled love story, a gaucho story, a political satire, and a Japanese narrative imbued with delicate eroticism and seasonal references made in haiku
style.
Iser’s observation from “The Reading Process”, which stands as a
motto for this paper, is particularly relevant in Calvino’s case, as If on a
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
Winter’s Night a Traveler is “so fragmentary that one’s attention is almost
exclusively occupied with the search for connections between the fragments”. This certainly holds true both for the Reader-protagonist and for
real readers. As a result, we-as-readers experience a similar frustration at
the taunting incompleteness of the fragment-stories as the Reader-protagonist. Practically, fragmentariness in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler has a
unique effect: it reduces to a minimum the distance between the “real”
world and the fictional one by means of this mirroring or mimicking of the
circumstances of the reading process.
Calvino’s novel offers an unexpected theoretical twist, a kind of “turn
of the screw” in this highly intricate “network of lines that intersect”, or a
deeper walk into Umberto Eco’s “fictional woods”, in that If on a Winter’s
Night a Traveler becomes ever more self-referential: the titles of the fragment-stories embedded in the Reader’s story converge — in chronological
order — in Chapter Eleven, making up yet another fragment-story that
metafictionally turns upon itself by means of mise en abyme:
“If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from
the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that
intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an
empty grave — What story down there awaits its end? — he asks, anxious
to hear the story” (Calvino 1993: 252).
The final sentence of this paragraph (“He asks, anxious to hear the
story”) is the title given by the Reader to an “interrupted book” from childhood, whose actual title he had forgotten, and condenses the general mood
of the protagonist of Calvino’s novel, in frantic search for an ending. The discussion between the Reader-protagonist and the other readers at the library
is, of course, a representation of a possible conversation between the writer
and his actual readers (again, the addressee is the second person):
“Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In
ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the
tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate
meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the
inevitability of death” (Calvino 1993: 253).
The illusion of real-life conversation is, however, quickly dispelled by
the next paragraph, which concludes Chapter Eleven, another ironic exam-
98
ple of playfully “baring the device”, exposing the condition of artifact — “You
stop for a moment to reflect on these words. Then, in a flash, you decide
you want to marry Ludmilla” (Calvino 1993: 253) — and parodying one of
the conventional narrative closures, the traditional happy ending. Chapter
Twelve, which consists of only seven lines, is the excipit of If on a Winter’s
Night a Traveler, in perfect symmetry with the incipit of the novel: “And you
say, ‘Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by
Italo Calvino’”.
Fragmentariness is motivated in the récit by “the translator’s machinations” (Calvino 1993: 154), i.e. Ermes Marana’s, who is possessed by a compulsive need, borne out of jealousy, to “affirm his presence” (155) in every
book by altering it, insinuating himself into it, subverting the very idea of
authorship. The archetype of traduttore traditore, a quintessential trickster,
the “archenemy of reading” (Weiss 1993:174), Marana is “a serpent who
injects his malice into the paradise of reading” (Calvino 1993: 122), “no
doubt a Calvino incarnation of deconstruction” (Weiss 1993: 176), a “treacherous translator” who dreams “of a literature made entirely of apocrypha, of
false attributions, of imitations and counterfeits and pastiches” (Calvino
1993: 155), hoping to shake the very “foundations” of literature, “where the
relationship between reader and text is established” (155).
The translator “injects his malice” into the books of the Irish novelist
Silas Flannery, the writer who has come to be at a loss of words, producing
only fragments, and blaming the language itself for this fragmentariness: “I
do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what
remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable” (Calvino 1993: 177).
Flannery is responsible for the narrative incompleteness as he experiences
writer’s block, being unable to go beyond the incipits of the sundry novels
he has begun writing. In his eclectic diary — the only thing he is still able to
write — Flannery glosses on reading, assigning the reader a central role and
going as far as to eliminate the figure of the author from the equation — a
form of radical depersonalization — replacing the Cartesian “I think therefore I am” with “I read, therefore it writes” (172): “If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. … Only the ability
to be read by a certain individual proves that what is written shares in the
power of writing … The universe will express itself as long as somebody will
be able to say, ‘I read, therefore it writes.’”
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It is Silas Flannery, “Calvino’s obvious alter ego” (Weiss 1993: 176),
who offers a “perfect iconic double” (McHale 2003: 126) of If on a Winter’s
Night a Traveler in his diary, by means of mise en abyme:
I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted. The
Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z. But it is a defective copy, he
can’t go beyond the beginning. ... He returns to the bookshop to have the
volume exchanged. ...
I could write it all in the second person: you, Reader ... I could also introduce a young lady, the Other Reader, and a counterfeiter-translator, and an
old writer who keeps a diary like this diary (Calvino 1993: 193).
Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti sees the novel as “a discourse, conducted
with a margin of irony and playfulness, concerning the dissolution of the
forms of literature. The work which is sought in the book is always different
from the one which keeps presenting and revealing itself” (qtd. in Weiss
1993: 180). Ultimately, however self-referential and self-subverting the novel
may be, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is successful at least in deconstructing all modern and postmodern theories of fiction. Calvino anticipates
all possible readings and (mis)interpretations and discards them one by
one, transmuting what one of his fictional personae says (another selfreflexive discourse) into fact:
It is my image that I want to multiply, but not out of narcissism or megalomania, as could all too easily be believed: on the contrary, I want to conceal, in the midst of so many illusory ghosts of myself, the true me, who
makes them move. (…)
I would like all the details that I am writing down to concur in creating the
impression of a high-precision mechanism, but at the same time of a succession of dazzles that reflect something that remains out of eyeshot.
(Calvino 1993: 158-160)
A “high-precision mechanism” with different intricacies and challenges is the main text of Annie Proulx’s novel. The thirty-nine titled chapters of The Shipping News abound in narrative and graphic knots, both literally — a knot signals the end of an episode, at the same time “tying” the
story together — and figuratively, rendering the image of story as fabric, of
writing as both techné and poiesis, and of the writer as creatrix. Not incidentally, two types of narrators associated with the realist tradition — omnis-
100
cient narrator and intrusive narrator — are used by Proulx in order to manipulate the character’s destinies and the course of events whose “arrangement”, as the epigraph of the novel states unambiguously, is pre-established. In this sense, Proulx makes ample use of analepsis and prolepsis,
fragmenting the linearity of the narrative and forcing readers “to re-enact
Quoyle’s own gropings, hesitations and false starts as he attempts to build a
new life” (Varvogli 2002: 39).
All three literary devices — analepsis, prolepsis and delayed decoding
— are employed to fragment the story-time (Chatman 1980: 62), a narrative
disjunction of time that parallels the “syncopated language” based on broken sentences or verbless clauses —“Voices over the wire, the crump of
folding steel, flame” (Proulx 2002: 22); “Ice welding land to sea. Frost
smoke. Clouds mottled by reflections of water holes in the plains of ice. The
glare of ice erasing dimension, distance, subjecting senses to mirage and
illusion. A rare place” (249). Dismembered time and language echo, in turn,
the protagonist’s initial feelings of displacement and alienation, and the
characters’ fragmented lives made up of stories tied in knots.
After the suicide of both his parents and the loss of his wife in a car
accident, Quoyle moves with his two daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, and
his aunt, Agnis Ham, to Killick-Claw, in Newfoundland, his ancestral homeland, to “start anew”. He gets a job at the local newspaper, Gammy Bird,
where he is given the duty to cover car crashes. At first reluctant, Quoyle
gradually understands that confronting his fears is part of the recovery
process, and that everyone has a hidden trauma to overcome.
Quoyle’s healing process, which can be seen as knotting together disparate fragments of selfhood, is assisted by the other members of the community who gradually accept him by sharing fragments of their life-stories.
If the family knots cannot be untied and the past cannot be changed, coming to terms with one’s life is possible by tying friendship knots. In this
sense, Louise Flavin (qtd. in Varvogli 2002: 44) argues that Chapter 1 introduces Quoyle as a piece of rope without a knot (“Quoyle: A coil of rope”),
a man with no connections. Furthermore, he is coiled around himself,
which suggests that he is isolated, self-absorbed, or incapable of forming
relations (Varvogli 2002: 44). The positive symbolism of the knots would
therefore refer to the ties between members of a family and the community as a whole, and stories are the catalyst of this bonding. It is through telling
stories that Quoyle earns respect and builds his self-esteem: in charge of the
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
“shipping news” he starts to investigate the history of each vessel, connecting history to people’s stories, creating a sense of identity.
Storytelling and fragmentariness are the focal points of The Shipping
News. Proulx uses fragments of research — her academic background
enabled her to peruse materials with a keen eye for details —, fragments of
experience and imagination to sew a story-quilt. At the same time, the narrative discourse itself is fragmented, full of information gaps, deliberate
omissions, elliptical language, “staccato rhythms and stylistic tics” (qtd. in
Varvogli 2002: 73), while the story recounts a broken, fragmented man’s
unlikely quest for completeness which he founds by means of storytelling.
In this sense, The Shipping News is self-reflexive and self-conscious, but
also self-undermining. The excipit of the story correlates with the disclaimer
featured on the copyright page, converting the narrative discourse into
metadiscourse.
This conventional happy ending is ironical, validating the self-subverting aspects of The Shipping News, the idea of craftiness and artificiality,
“baring the device”. Annie Proulx claims that she decided to give a “happy”
ending to this novel in response to readers’ comments on her previous
works of fiction. “I was so tired of people saying Postcards was dark,” she
confessed, “and after I’d heard it for the 900th time I thought — OK, so a
happy ending is wanted, isn’t it. So I thought I’d have an amusing time writing a book with a happy ending. Although the happy part of The Shipping
News was the absence of pain, so it’s a sort of happiness by default” (qtd.
in Varvogli 2002: 64). Like Italo Calvino, Proulx assigns readers a central role:
“However you read it that’s how it is” (qtd. in Varvogli 2002: 65), she replied
to a female reader who was disappointed to learn that the happy ending
was ironic and contrived to meet readers’ expectations. Thus, in The
Shipping News, the closure is, in Roland Barthes’ expression, à la fois posé
et déçu (qtd. in Kermode 1983: 62), “erasing” or cancelling itself.
Both Calvino — in rejecting or resisting completeness — and Proulx
— in parodying the conventional ending — deconstruct the very notion of
closure, of what Kermode calls “one of the most powerful of the local and
provincial restrictions”, the narrative “tabu” “that a novel must end”
(Kermode 1983: 56), assigning fragmentariness a subversive role.
The questions regarding the nature of fiction, the violation of boundaries between worlds, the relationship between reader and text, etc. raised
by both If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and The Shipping News, and bear-
102
ing “either on the ontology of the literary text itself or on the ontology of the
world it projects” seem to support Brian McHale’s thesis according to which
“the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological” (McHale 2003: 10-11).
The strategy both novelists adopt in order to posit such questions is pervasive fragmentariness. In this sense, both novels can be seen as pertaining to
what Roukhomovsky called l’ordre fragmentaire as both of them are built
on the tension between continuity and discontinuity, between inclusion and
omission, between completeness and fragmentariness.
L’exigence fragmentaire as “persistent unsettling of intellectual and
artistic territories and ideological positions” (Strathman 2006: 31) appears
correlated in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and The Shipping News with
the problem of reading. Calvino playfully frustrates readers’ expectations
while Proulx, equally playfully, meets them and in so doing cancels them.
Both writers thus literally reassert the point made by Ford Madox Ford in The
Good Soldier, a point brilliantly summarized by Frank Kermode in the chapter on “recognition and deception” in The Art of Telling:
We are in a world of which it needs to be said not that plural readings
are possible (for this is true of all narrative) but that the illusion of the single
right reading is possible no longer (Kermode 1983: 102).
References
Butler, C. 2002. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press.
Calvino, I. 1993. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Translated by William Weaver. New
York, London, Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf.
Chatman, S. 1980 [1978]. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and
Film. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Currie, M. 1998. Postmodern Narrative Theory. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave.
Du Plessix Gray, Francine. June 21, 1981. “Visiting Italo Calvino”, in The New York
Times Book Review.
Elias, Camelia. 2004. The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative
Genre. Bern: Peter Lang.
Harland, R. 1999. Literary Theory from Plato to Barthes: An Introductory History.
Basingstoke (Hampshire) and New York: Palgrave.
Harter, Deborah A. 1996. Bodies in Pieces: Fantastic Narrative and the Poetics of the
Fragment. Stanford (California): Stanford University Press.
Hassan, I. 1993. “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism”, in Postmodernism: A
Reader, edited by Th. Docherty. Hempstead (London): Harvester Wheatsheaf.
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Iser, W. 1972. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach”, in Issues in
Contemporary Critical Theory. Barry, Peter (ed.). 1987 Basingstoke
(Hampshire) and London: MacMillan.
Kermode, F. 1983 [1972]. The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Lacoue-Labarthe, P. and J-L. Nancy. 1988. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of
Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl
Lester. Albany: State University of New York Press.
McHale, B. 2003 [1987]. Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Routledge.
Nochlin, Linda. 2001 [1992]. The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of
Modernity. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Proulx, Annie. 2002 [1993]. The Shipping News. London: Fourth Estate.
Roukhomovsky, B. 2005 [2001]. Lire les formes brèves. Paris: Armand Colin.
Strathman, C. A. 2006. Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative: Schlegel,
Byron, Joyce, Blanchot. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Varvogli, Aliki. 2002. Annie Proulx’s “The Shipping News”: A Reader’s Guide. New
York and London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Weiss, B. 1993. Understanding Calvino. Columbia (South Carolina): University of
South Carolina Press.
DEARLY BELOVED:
TONI MORRISON’S RESURRECTION OF THE AFRICANAMERICAN NARRATIVE
CRISTINA CHEVEREªAN
Abstract: In a contemporary American society that prides itself on
multiculturalism, the rise of strong ‘minority’ voices seems only natural. Toni
Morrison takes it upon herself to use the language of literature as an exquisite
means of recreating history. This paper views Beloved as a creative transcript
of African-American experience, as high-quality fiction meant to capture the
essence of traditional story-telling.
Winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a key element in
Morrison’s successful claim to the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, Beloved is
probably one of the most generously acclaimed novels in recent American
and world fiction-writing. Its surface-level seems to classify it as a thriller
centered upon a typical poltergeist-case: Sethe’s house is literally inhabited
and, at a certain point, run by a ghost. However, the actual story behind this
hallucinating atmosphere runs a lot deeper, the novel putting forward, in
fact, a skilful reconstruction of black history in America during and after the
Civil War.
Beloved is a tale of tales. Its intricate web of fragmented personal narratives gives the impression of recreating the main characters’ individual
identities. However, apart from a painful re(dis)covery of the self, the book
offers a spectacular resurrection of a larger-than-life ghost: that of slavery
itself. What the writer does is to rewrite the factual experience of an
oppressed minority by means of unleashing its demons, by means of giving
a voice to the people whose version of the truth has always been subject to
that of the more coherent, more literate and therefore more credible master-narratives.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved reconceptualizes American history. Most apparent in the novel is the historical perspective: Morrison constructs history
through the acts and consciousness of African-American slaves rather than
106
through the perspective of the dominant white social classes. But historical methodology takes another vital-shift in Beloved; history-making
becomes a healing process for the characters, the reader, and the author
(Krumholz in Andrews & McKay 1999: 107).
The whole novel is structured around the characters’ recollections of
a repressed past. Each of the individuals whose destinies intermingle has a
particular relationship to the traumatic events everybody seems to think are
better left unspoken. The reincarnation of a dead child, a direct victim to the
horrors of slavery, is a narrative pretext. The accompanying shock within
the community triggers a memory-wave. While attempts are made to find
out and accommodate the truth about Beloved as a person, what actually
happens is a re-shaping of stereotypical perceptions of the effects and
repercussions of slavery as a general process.
“To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay”
(Morrison 1998: 45). This is one of the first indications that the return of the
past into the protagonist’s life will equal a journey into dark territories. It is
out of these ambiguous regions of the human psyche that Beloved’s ghost
ominously surfaces. Her appearance is rather symbolic: it is not she who
haunts her mother’s consciousness, it is the inherent cruelty of a life without a self, without the right to own anything (own progeny included).
Taken at face value, the novel could be superficially dismissed as the
story of a murderous mother hiding from the consequences of her infanticide. What the book actually deals with is the dramatic experience of a
mother forced into believing that death was a better option for her children
than life at the mercy of the unmerciful. At the narrative core lie the voices
of the insignificant — the children, the women, the blacks — who come to
contradict the white elitist assumption that the only way to ultimate knowledge is the written word. Morrison’s initiative is rather of an anthropological
nature, a minute recording of life-stories as means of recreating historical
truth.
Mae G. Henderson’s article on Re-Membering the Body as Historical
Text makes a fairly convincing point in this respect, resorting to the writers’
own statements:
In a 1989 interview, Morrison tells us that Beloved is a book ‘about something that the characters don’t want to remember, I don’t want to remember, black people don’t want to remember, white people don’t want to
remember.’ The author’s remarks speak to a public desire to repress the
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
personal aspects of the story of slavery. Returning to Morrison’s role as historian and analyst, however, we see that her accomplishment in this novel
is precisely not to allow for the continuation of a ‘national amnesia’ regarding this chapter in America’s history […] The importance of our private
memories becomes, ultimately, the basis for a reconstructed public history (1991: 83).
Private memory is the mechanism that fascinates both writer and
reader in Beloved. Its sinuous workings, its emotional response to pressure
are all things to be translated into Morrison’s account of tales. What the
Nobel-prize winner does is to dwell upon the essentially oral tradition of the
black community in order to reconstruct its history. Her approach is one
that employs artistic creativity as an effective tool directed at exploring the
cultural heritage of one of America’s most vibrant minorities. Talking about
the fate of African-Americans whose access to literacy and therefore public
recognition was constantly denied for ages, she gets even. As an accomplished 20th century writer, she uses the master-power of the written word
in order to glorify the importance of verbal art.
Morrison claims that it is precisely because the black oral historical tradition is now a thing of the past that the African-American novel is so necessary: ‘the novel is needed by African Americans now in a way that it was
not needed before… We don’t live in places where we can hear those stories anymore; parents don’t sit around and tell their children those classical, mythological, archetypal stories that we heard years ago’. Those stories must have a place in African-American culture, and they have found
their place in the novel. The novel becomes for Morrison what Aunt Sue
was for Langston Hughes — the site of an oral history passed from generation to generation (Rushdy 1999: 56).
Viewed through this particular lens, Morrison’s characters in Beloved
are all storytellers, starting with Baby Suggs, to whom the art of preaching is
a way of communal action, a ritual means of preserving and reviving tradition (cf. Harris 1999: passim). While she seems to be the priestess of absolution, she is also the one that sets things in motion, the one with an amazing, almost supernatural power. “Why is she always the center of things?
How come she always knows exactly what to do and when? Giving advice;
passing messages; healing the sick, hiding fugitives, loving, cooking, cooking, loving, preaching, singing, dancing and loving everybody like it was her
job and hers alone” (Morrison 1988: 144).
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One can easily notice in this particular passage the parallelism
between the vital collector of other people’s narratives and the tradition of
story-telling itself. Just as Baby Suggs occupies a central place in the community, equally translating its ecstasies and its anxieties into poetry, storytelling lies at the heart of the novel as a primordial way of giving advice,
passing messages, suffering and rejoicing. Relying upon ritual practices of
psychic healing, both the character and her method respond to “the necessity for a psychological cleansing from the past, a space to encounter painful
memories safely and rest from them” (Krumholz 1999: 110).
The insertion of Dearly Beloved’s ghost into Sethe’s life is meant as a
persuasive moral obligation for her to face her shameful, bitterly repressed
memories. The entire string of personal and collective discourses that surround her exemplifies the way in which the burden of personal and historical consciousness can be made bearable by means of directly addressing
the troubling issues. From this point of view, Paul D, the male protagonist, is
probably the most coherent investigator, the alert consciousness, the camera eye that records reality.
During, before and after the War he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything. Who,
like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food; who, like him,
stole from pigs; who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by
night; who, like him, had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells
to avoid regulators, raiders, patrollers, veterans, hill men, posses and merrymakers. Once he met a Negro about fourteen years old who lived by
himself in the woods and said he couldn’t remember living anywhere else.
He saw a witless coloredwoman jailed and hanged for stealing ducks she
believed were her own babies. Move. Walk. Run. Hide. Steal and move on
(Morrison 1988: 70).
In such passages, Morrison uses the third person omniscient narration
to render experiences too hard to voice for Paul D. or any other black fugitive for that matter. The writer makes her readers witnesses to the minority’s humiliation by the dominant white culture. Clear references to oppression and segregation are embedded into the narrative. Morrison resorts to
silent memory rather than to outspoken testimonies since language stands
rebuked in a world in which free speech is annihilated. The overflow of stories in the novel, the gradual growth of the past out of dismantled narratives
marks a particular form of rebellion, a subversion of the silent pattern.
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
The War had been over four or five years then, but nobody white or black
seemed to know it. Odd clusters and strays of Negroes wandered the back
roads and cowpaths from Schenedtady to Jackson. […] Configurations
and blends of families of women and children, while elsewhere, solitary,
hunted and hunting for, were men, men, men. Forbidden public transportation, chased by debt and filthy ‘talking sheets’, they followed secondary routes, scanned the horizon for signs and counted heavily on each
other. Silent, except for social courtesies, when they met one another they
neither described nor asked about the sorrow that drove them from one
place to another. The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew
(56).
This is the confusing, contradictory background against which Sethe’s
story unfolds. After the end of the Civil War, the whole ‘order’ of things is disrupted. Reconstruction brings about hope and disillusionment, theoretical
changes and ruthless practices, the glamorous perspective of equal rights
projected against the dark screen of exploitation and unforgettable mistreatments. Beloved offers a crash-course in black history as seen through
the eyes of its characters: the abolitionist frenzy and the (physical and mental) torture that prevents them from clearly articulating their memories.
No more discussions, stormy or quiet, about the true meaning of the
Fugitive Bill, the Settlement Fee, God’s Ways and Negro pews; antislavery,
manumission, skin voting, republicans, Dred Scott, book learning,
Sojourner’s highwheeled buggy, the Colored Ladies of Delaware, Ohio,
and the other weighty issues that held them in chairs, scraping the floorboards or pacing them in agony or exhilaration. No anxious wait for the
North Star or news of a beat-off. No sighing at a new betrayal or handclapping at a small victory (181).
To the reader who is at least briefly acquainted with the realities of
American history during the 19th century, each of the aforementioned
words and images recalls particular realities of the time. The factual frame
used in Beloved can be easily recognized. The point of view, however, is
one that imposed illiteracy and fear managed to silence back when black
and inexistent were synonymous. As Dana Heller (1994: 105) puts it, “that
picture is the historical process of American social and economic development. Its organizing principle is racial oppression, or more specifically the
dynamic of relations of domination perpetuated by the institutional enslavement of Africans who were brought to the American colonies as indentured
servants as early as 1619”.
110
From this particular perspective, Beloved is a restoration of order, a
balancing of the discursive scale. The reconstruction of a denied self and of
its relationships to alterity (family, community, society) is undertaken
through re-memorising in the act of storytelling. While Mae G. Henderson
talks about “the notion of ‘literary archaeology’ — the imaginative and
reconstructive recovery of the past which characterizes Morrison’s fictive
process” (1991: 66), Sethe, the novels’ protagonist herself warns from the
very beginning against the overwhelming power of remembrance and the
powerlessness of humans to sever connections with an uncomfortable
past:
Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my
rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do.
But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone,
but the place — the picture of it — stays, and not just in my rememory, but
out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out
there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place
where it happened (Morrison 1988: 38).
This function of this passage is premonitory, since Sethe will find herself swallowed by her dead daughter’s ghost, by the reincarnated past, by
the embodied memory that literally feeds on her. “It became a way to feed
her. Just as Denver discovered and relied on the delightful effect sweet
things had on Beloved, Sethe learned the profound satisfaction Beloved got
from storytelling. It amazed Sethe (as much as it pleased Beloved) because
every mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost” (62).
One of the main assets of Morrison’s prose is the play upon ambivalence,
the paradoxical, mixed nature of remembrance. The sharing of stories can
be salutary, life-supporting, but at the same time it may have a destructive
effect. It is through them that the hurt comes alive once more, it is through
them that it can finally be put to rest.
Sethe’s story is one of merciless dispossession. She has undergone the
dreadful experience of not owning anything, not even herself. She has been
somebody’s property, she has been treated as merchandise, like so many of
her kind. Her sickly attachment to Beloved is strictly connected to trauma.
The feeling of free ownership of her own flesh and blood is what Sethe desperately needs to compensate for the loss of her milk and her baby — a
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
woman’s most intimate ‘belongings’. Her frame of mind is shaped by the
master-narrative, in which the blacks are depicted as trading objects.
Shackled, walking through the perfumed things honeybees love, Paul D
hears the men talking and for the first time learns his worth. He has always
known, or believed he did, his value — as a hand, a laborer who could
make profit on a farm — but now he discovers his worth, which is to say
he learns his price. The dollar value of his weight, his strength, his brain,
his penis, and his future (238).
Sethe’s inner struggle in the novel is that of breaking free. The official
threat of slavery has been removed. The scar that remains is primarily mental. While the tree on Sethe’s back, the physical proof of her past, has
caused the skin to go numb, the woman’s mind and heart cannot remain
frozen. Morrison’s skillfully rendered message is conveyed by means of the
voices: Sethe’s own, trembling, stuttering, growing stronger in time, Paul
D’s, the voice of reason (“me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody.
We need some kind of tomorrow”) and, louder than any other, Baby Suggs’,
holy’s. The ultimate lesson is that of self-respect and love as opposed to
practical and mental enslavement. The way in which it is phrased, its vivid
orality, its incantatory form, makes it probably one of the most powerful
messages in American literature:
Here, she said, in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh
that dances on bare feet in the grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do
not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just
as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder
flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use,
tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise
them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke
them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you!
And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see
it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed.
What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish
your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they
don’t love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about
here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance;
backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling
you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck
unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke
it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for
hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver — love it, love it, and the
112
beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than
lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and
your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the
prize (94).
References
Andrews, W. L., Nellie Y. McKay (eds.). 1999. Tony Morrison’s Beloved. A Casebook.
New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harris, Trudier. 1999. “Beloved. Woman, Thy Name Is Demon”, in Andrews, W.L. &
N.Y. McKay, N.Y. (eds.). Tony Morrison’s Beloved. A Casebook. New York,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 127-158.
Heller, Dana. 1994. “Reconstructing Kin: Family, History and Narrative in Toni
Morrison’s Beloved”, in College Literature, June 1994, vol. 21, nr. 2,
pp. 105-117.
Krumholz, Linda. 1999. “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni
Morrison’s Beloved”, in Andrews, W.L. & N.Y. McKay, N.Y. (eds.). Tony
Morrison’s Beloved. A Casebook. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 107-126.
Mae G. Henderson.1999. “Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Re-Membering the Body as
Historical Text”, in Andrews, W.L. & N.Y. McKay, N.Y. (eds.). Tony Morrison’s
Beloved. A Casebook. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 79-106.
Morrison, Toni. 1988. Beloved. New York: Plume, Penguin.
Rushdy, A. H. A. 1999. “Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni
Morrison’s Beloved”, in Andrews, W.L. & N.Y. McKay, N.Y. (eds.). Tony
Morrison’s Beloved. A Casebook. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 37-66.
UNDEAF YOUR EARS: WHAT THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD II
GIVES US TO HEAR
JACQUES RAMEL
Université Lumière-Lyon 2
Abstract: In Shakespeare’s Richard II, the theme of death is present not
only through the vocabulary, but also through the sounds that are used, and
especially the rhymes. It could be argued that the play that you hear is more of
a tragedy than the play that you read. The present paper examines these sound
patterns and the way in which they enrich the meanings of the text.
The Tragedy of Richard II by William Shakespeare narrates the deposition of the last Plantagenet King of England, Richard II, by a usurper who
also happens to be his cousin, Bolingbroke, later King Henry IV. The play is
both a history play and a tragedy. I would like to argue in favour of the tragic reading of the play, and I will base my plea upon patterns of sounds in the
play, upon the oral rendering of the play rather than upon the written text.
Richard II is a play about nothing and nothingness — just as the
Tragedy of King Lear is. It is a play about absence, about hollowness — “the
hollow crown” of course, which is the illustration most commonly chosen
for the covers of editions of the play; but also the hollow of the grave, an
image that recurs in an obsessive way, in the form of the “hollow ground”
(Scroop, 3.2.140), or more strikingly as the “hollow womb” (Gaunt, 2.1.83)
— those graves that men keep digging tirelessly, sometimes even with their
tears as Richard suggests in 3.3.
Hollowness is linked with death in the image of the skull, with its main
characteristic, “the hollow eyes of Death” (2.1.270), and the skull is multiplied in “the field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls” (4.1.145) — the name
“Golgotha” itself being derived from a word meaning “skull” in he Aramaic
language. All those hollows are clamouring to be filled by dead bodies, by
Death himself who leads the dance from the central hollow of the crown:
“For within the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king /
Keeps Death his court” (3.2.160-2).
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Interestingly 7 of the 25 occurrences of the word “nothing” in Richard
II are to be found in one passage in 2.2: King Richard has just left England
for war in Ireland, and the Queen remains alone with the King’s favourites.
These repeated occurrences of the word “nothing” make this passage
remarkable, even to non-Shakespearean scholars, such as Slavoj Z̀íz̀ék who
has entitled one of his books Looking Awry (1991), a quotation from this
passage.
At first the Queen willingly admits that her grief is in excess of the event
that causes it — that is Richard’s departure for the war in Ireland. She is
aware of that excess of grief as she tells us, about her own soul, that “at
something it grieves / More than with parting from my lord the King” (2.2.123). But at the same time, paradoxically, she admits that this “something”
may be “nothing”: “…methinks / Some unborn sorrow, ripe in Fortune’s
womb, / Is coming towards me, and my inward soul / With nothing trembles” (9-12): what saddens her is “nothing” because it is yet “unborn”.
Bushy, who is one of Richard’s favourites, then attempts to comfort the
Queen by showing her that her sorrow is merely grounded upon illusion,
and he does this by using the optical games that were fashionable in those
days, first the multiple refraction of images by a block of glass cut with several facets, and then anamorphosis. We are easily convinced by Bushy’s use
of the image of the cut block of glass: by multiplying the reflexions of one
object, the numerous facets make this one object appear more threatening
than it really is.
Then, Bushy proceeds to use the optical trick of anamorphosis. Bushy
seems to be explaining the basis of anamorphosis: he tells us that there are
two ways of looking at an anamorphosis: either it is looked at a right angle
to its surface, that is “rightly gazed upon” (18); in this case, it is “nothing but
confusion”. On the contrary, you can only “distinguish form” (20) if you look
at it from one side, that is, if it is “eyed awry” (19): this is a classic definition
of anamorphosis.
But it is obvious that for Bushy, the main meanings of the words “rightly” and “awry” are not geometrical, but figurative, we could almost say
moral. For Bushy, looking at the painting “rightly”, that is squarely, with the
direction of your gaze at a right angle to its surface, is the only normal and
acceptable way of looking at it, whereas eyeing it “awry” is felt to be an
abnormal, or deviant, way of looking at it.
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
What Bushy is advising the Queen to do goes against pictorial orthodoxy. In his interpretation, the Queen is wrong because she is eyeing the situation “awry”, that is not “rightly”, which leads her to misunderstand it. In
this speech Bushy actually describes the current situation is terms of
anamorphosis, but nevertheless pleads in favour of looking at it as if it were
not so.
This leads us to wonder what it is that Bushy is trying to hide from the
Queen, and perhaps even from himself. What is it that becomes visible if
you look at the situation “awry”? What Bushy does not want to see is obviously the “nothing” that the Queen sees and that makes her sad, that
“unborn sorrow” which is soon to come to life. The Queen has caught sight
of that growing “nothing”, which must not be seen, and which is nevertheless about to be born — and which can only be death, the central hollow
around which the whole of the play is organized, death the unmentionable
— death which must not be mentioned, but which must not be seen either.
The anamorphosis that Bushy is thinking of could well be, actually, The
Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, painted in 1533, probably the
best known of the Renaissance anamorphoses, which is displayed at the
National Gallery in London.
When “rightly gazed upon”, this painting shows us two richly-clad
young men, two French ambassadors to the Court of England, with symbols
of crafts and arts in the background; critics have shown that the choice of
symbols in the background makes this a very complex work of art, and I will
not go into that. What I am interested in is the anamorphic part of it, which
is not the whole of the painting but only the long ivory-coloured shape
across the foreground of the canvas. When “eyed awry”, that is by an
observer who puts his eye against the bottom left corner of the canvas, this
shape appears to be a skull.
Whatever the primary reading of the painting is, this hidden skull turns
this work into a vanity, that is the category of works of art that brought
together symbols of life, of success, of greatness, of pleasure, and of human
knowledge, with a memento mori under the form of a skull: “vanitas vanitatis, omnia vanitas”.
Actually, just for the record: there may be another, lighter, meaning of
this skull: it may also be an in-joke on the name of the painter, Holbein, hohl
Bein, hollow bone — a sort of signature. But nevertheless, a skull.
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If we come back to the text: it may be possible to hear like an echo of
this memento mori in the repetition of the word “more” in the passage. The
word “more” sounds like the first syllable of words such as “mortal” or
“mortality”, and is repeated like a tolling knell, first by the Queen (13), then
three times by Bushy (22, and twice in 25). Speakers of any language of
Latin origin, such as Romanian, are of course more readily aware of the
overtones of the word which reminds us of “mort” in French, “moarte” in
Romanian.
When Bushy declares, “More is not seen / Or it if be, ’tis with false
Sorrow’s eye”, the sentence assumes a very explicit meaning if we accept
that behind the word “more” lurks the memento mori: what Bushy is telling
us is that we do not see the skull, or if we do, it is only because we have
allowed sorrow to make our sight false — that is, because we have allowed
sorrow to make us look “awry”. In other words, Bushy denies the presence
of death, and yet he cannot erase it from his speech.
In the dialogue between the Queen and Richard’s favourite, the Queen
comes out as the one who is willing to look straight into what she cannot
comprehend, into this “nothing” which is at the same time “something”,
which is the hollowness of death. This paradox, which cannot be uttered
clearly in words, is conveyed through a series of oppositions and of oxymorons which reaches their climax just before Green enters the stage, with
the phrase “Tis nameless woe, I wot” (40), a sentence that places side by
side knowledge and ignorance through the similarity between the two
words “woe” and “wot”, that bring together two irreconcilable truths: the
truth that you can see when you look at the painting squarely, and the truth
that can only be seen when you eye it awry: the Queen knows that she does
not know.
The unnamed terror that the Queen has sensed is suddenly embodied
by Green who is coming towards her, and who enters the stage to give
shape to the hollowness by lamenting the vacuum that was created as the
King left: emptiness clearly is the absence of the body of the King.
As to Bushy, his deliberate blindness in this passage cannot save him
long from seeing what he refuses to see here; in act 3, scene 1, he is finally
made to stare his own death in the face as he is sentenced to death by
Bolingbroke and led to the executioner.
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
The articulation of death and hollowness is nowhere more obvious
than in the very last scene of the play, which takes place around the coffin
of Richard within which lies the body of the dead King. There are two good
reasons why the King’s body should be visible in this scene. First,
Shakespeare follows the original narration by Holinshed throughout the
play, and there is no particular reason why he should not have done so in
this scene — and Holinshed explicitly states that the body of the King was
visible. The second reason is that a visible corpse is much more theatrical
than one within a closed coffin.
Exton, the murderer of the King, naively believes that the vacuum can
be filled, that the hollow coffin, or the hollow grave, can be satisfied, that it
can be sated just by burying in it the body of the dead King: “Great King,
within this coffin I present / Thy buried fear” (5.6.30-1): for Exton, the fear
that King Henry IV entertains for his own life can be allayed by filling the coffin with another body, thus putting an end to the hunger of the grave.
But the hollow grave is bottomless, and Bolingbroke himself is now
aware of that, as the end of the play is decidedly more sombre and more
reflective than the first acts. The play ends on a couplet by the new King,
with “here” rhyming with “bier”, that is death articulated with the present:
“Grace my mourning here / In weeping after this untimely bier” (51-2). The
very last word in the play is “bier”, as if death had been the ultimate purpose
followed by Richard.
We are reminded once more that the only truth of drama is to be found
in words, in sounds, especially at a time when, as you know, Shakespeare’s
contemporaries did not go to the playhouse to “watch” a play as we do
nowadays, but to “hear” a play, as the phrase was then.
Just as Bushy unknowingly announced the coming death of Richard
through his repetition of the word “more”, similarly the “here / bier” rhyme
in the final couplet of the play forces us to apprehend the play as a tragedy
more than as a political drama. But, more interestingly, this final couplet
also forces us to look closely at the occurrences in the rest of the play of
words that rhyme with “bier”, and particularly of the words “ear”, the organ,
and “to hear”, the function.
My attention is first attracted to the dialogue between York and Gaunt,
two uncles of the young King, which opens the long first scene of act 2. Both
of them are typified as old men, and Gaunt is dying; and not surprisingly for
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us, we hear the word “more” four times within the first few lines that he
speaks (twice in 9, then 11, 14).
Whereas York advises Gaunt to stop any attempt at advising Richard,
“for all in vain comes counsel to his ear” (4), Gaunt replies that more weight
is attached to the words of a dying man, such as he is: “Where words are
scarce, they are seldom spent in vain” (7). It may well be “in vain” that these
two old men, figures of mortality, try to talk to this “vain” young man, who
is associated with the notion of vanity by both his uncles (24, 38). Gaunt nevertheless decides to speak to Richard, convinced that, as a dying man, he
can make Richard listen, whereas he would not be heard while living:
“Though Richard my life’s counsel would not hear, / My death’s sad tale may
yet undeaf his ear” (15-6).
But it is just as impossible to make Richard hear the words of death as
it is to make Bushy see death in the first passage that we studied: death cannot be heard any more than it can be seen. The vanity (etymologically
meaning “vacuum”, from the Latin “vanus”, hollow) of Richard closes his
ears to the message of death, whereas they are wide open to the “lascivious metres” of life (19), just as much as Bushy closes his eye to the anamorphic “vanity” in the scene that we studied first. Richard will not hear, just as
Bushy will not see.
The speech in which Gaunt conveys his confidence that he can open
the ears of Richard is composed of twelve lines, ten of which are rhymed.
After the opening couplet (7-8), the next four lines have rhymes following an
a-b-b-a pattern, and are followed again by two rhymed couplets. The final
rhyme that brings together “hear” and “ear” sounds like an announcement
of the final rhyme in the play, “here / bier”, and therefore like an announcement of Richard’s coffin. Richard’s closed ear announces the final coffin just
as much as Bushy’s closed eye announces his beheading. The importance
of this “hear / ear” rhyme is shown by it being announced a few lines earlier (“For all in vain comes counsel to his ear” 4), and then recalled a few
lines later (“…quickly buzzed into his ears” 26).
My hypothesis is that, in this fundamental scene, a network of echoes
is initiated, that will be followed up right to the end of the play, to the final
“bier”, and to the achievement of Richard’s destiny. The ear of the spectator, or rather that of the listener that the Elizabethan theatre-goer was, has
now been alerted to a phonematic chain whose recurrence he can follow
right to the end of the performance.
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
After he has returned from Ireland, Richard is a changed man, and
open to the truth. When Scroop comes to inform him of the catastrophes
that have occurred while he was away, Richard describes himself as ready
to hear the worst: “Mine ear is open”, he says (3.2.93), in contrast to his earlier deliberate deafness.
The change that has happened to him is highlighted in act five when,
now a prisoner of Bolingbroke in Pomfret Castle, Richard hears music poorly played, and, in a passage starting with the word “here” (45), he contrasts
the current fineness of his ears, which now makes him aware of any musical discordance (“And here I have the daintiness of ear / To check time
broke in a disordered string”, 5.5.45-6) with the deafness that was his in the
recent past, when he was king (“for the concord of my state and time / [I]
had not an ear to hear my true time broke”, 47-8), and when his uncle’s
words of advice were unable to “undeaf his ear”. When he has lost everything, a state of things that is described in the play with numerous verbs
starting with the prefix “un-”, Richard has not only been “unkinged” as he
describes himself, but also “undeafed”.
Once he has come back from Ireland, Richard not only accepts death,
but also seeks it, urged forward by his death drive. Richard is then constantly tottering on the verge, standing on the walls of the castle at Flint ready to
fall to the ground like Phaeton, picturing himself on the margin of a well or
on the rim of a grave, fascinated by those hollows and by the vacuum to
which he aspires. This rush towards the grave is what makes his ears open
wide, and ready to absorb any news that announces death now.
Now he would be ready to imbibe Gaunt’s threatening advice, or to
see the skull with hollow eyes that Bushy refused to imagine. This rush
towards the final “bier” is the form that the tragic takes in this particular
tragedy.
That Richard II is, deep down, a tragedy, is of course not a surprise.
Nevertheless, I have the impression that the sounds, the assonances, and
especially the rhymes of the text focus our attention relentlessly upon the
tragic aspect of the play, whereas perhaps the written text keeps a more
even balance between the political and the tragic. In other words, the play
that we hear may not be exactly the same as the play that we read; the text,
when spoken, may make us hear something slightly different from what we
read.
120
Not only have we, spectators, had our eyes opened by the text that
forces us to eye the play “awry”, but, more powerfully, we have also had our
ears “undeafed”.
References
Shakespeare, William. 2002. King Richard II. Ed. Charles R. Forker. London: The
Arden Shakespeare Third Series, Thomson Learning.
Z̀íz̀ék, Slavoj. 1991. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular
Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
INSCRIPTION AND ENCRYPTION:
DAPHNE DU MAURIER’S REBECCA
KLAUDIA PAPP
University of Debrecen
Abstract: Drawing upon Silverman’s and Kristeva’s ideas on melancholia, the
paper claims that du Maurier’s Rebecca dramatizes Silverman’s thesis
asserting that women are constitutively melancholic: having to renounce the
mother as a devalued object of desire, but also required to identify with her,
daughters tend to encrypt the mother’s imago, an abject that will inhabit
(haunt) the boundaries of their egos.
In her outstanding book on Hitchcock and feminist film theory, Tania
Modleski begins the chapter devoted to the reading of Hitchcock’s filmic
adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s enormously popular novel Rebecca by
quoting a critical remark according to which “the film fails either to assimilate or to vomit out the indigestible novelettish ingredients of Daphne du
Maurier’s book” (1988:43). She goes on to add how Hitchcock himself dismissed his own film for not being a truly Hitchcockian picture due to its
“novelettish” features that he directly associated with the fact that the book
belonged to the school of feminine literature written at that period. As
Modleski concludes on the same page, the novelettish aspects of the film
are clearly related to the essentially feminine aspect of the book, “a femininity that remains alien and disturbing, neither expelled nor ‘digested’ in
the course of the film”.
Such critical comments seem to echo the novel’s central male character, Maxim de Winter’s puzzlement as regards the alien and disturbing
nature of femininity. He attests himself to be similarly intrigued by femininity’s clandestine character, when — using his customary paternal tone — he
lectures his young wife on the basic differences between the sexes. In his
educational speech he delineates a clearly oppositional, binary structure for
the masculine and the feminine: “If I told you I was thinking about Surrey
and Middlesex I was thinking about Surrey and Middlesex. Men are simpler
than you imagine, my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted tortuous
122
minds of women would baffle anyone” (du Maurier 1992: 210). Maxim’s
choice of words here makes it immediately apparent that there is more at
stake in his words than the mere verbalization of the enigmatic nature of
femininity. Dictionaries invariably provide the following entries for the
words “twisted” and “tortuous” respectively: “twisted” means (1) wound or
wrapped around something, (2) strained or wrenched out of normal shape,
and (3) having an intended meaning altered or misrepresented. “Tortuous”
denotes (1) full of twists and turns, but also connotes the meanings (2) not
direct or straightforward, and (3) deceitfully indirect or morally crooked.
Accordingly, what seem to be contrasted in the binary pattern Maxim
sketches here are a simple and straightforward masculinity that has a primal relation to meaning, truth(fulness) and authenticity, and a grotesque,
abnormal, deceptive, morally inferior femininity, alien and threatening for
its capability of distorting, manipulating and misrepresenting (intended)
meaning and truth.
To Maxim femininity (associated with his late first wife Rebecca) is
threatening and deceitful as it fails to function as a screen reflecting back
the masculine fantasy of self-sameness and as such it challenges the
authority of the male subject. The only way to eliminate this threat is
through acts of violence: by silencing feminine difference for good (around
the middle of the novel the reader is informed that Rebecca did not drown
but Maxim shot her) and by forcefully substituting this otherness with the
fantasy of an idealized, tamed femininity (associated with the narrator). Yet,
in the course of the novel, this femininity refuses to be suppressed and contained very easily: it returns to haunt the characters and Manderley, jeopardizing the conventional, normative resolution of the novel’s romance plot. As
Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok claim, when haunting occurs in the psychoanalytic sense of the word it is always already textual and intersubjective: the “phantom” that returns to haunt the subject is “the ‘unsaid’ and the
‘unsayable’ of an other, [t]he silence, gap, or secret in the speech of someone else” (qtd. in Castricano 2001: 24). In the novel this “phantom” haunting the narrator is Maxim’s secret of the threatening femininity and female
sexuality embodied in the spectral image of Rebecca, kept “alive” by
Rebecca’s devoted surrogate Mrs. Danvers. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik,
two of du Maurier’s best-known critics, note how the text abounds in references to secrets, locks, keys and knowledge barred from the narrator
(1998:103). Maxim’s reading of the riddle of femininity and sexual difference
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
is clearly based on his belief in the idea of an omnipotent male mastery of
meaning and knowledge. The fantasy of man’s exclusive access to proper
meaning includes the fantasy of his privilege to create meaning and monitor the knowledge of that meaning, to decide what is right and what is
wrong, what is the truth and what is only a distortion of the truth. His wish
to control the narrator’s access to prohibited knowledge is made evident in
one of the most frequently quoted passages of the text in which, after witnessing his young wife’s unconscious momentary identification with
Rebecca, he accuses her of having had “a flash of knowledge in [her] eyes.
Not the right sort of knowledge” (du Maurier 1992:211), because it made her
look “deceitful” (210). Then, in the voice of an authoritative father figure,
who has every right to decide what is the right and what is the wrong kind
of knowledge his daughter can or cannot get access to, he claims: “Listen,
my sweet. When you were a little girl, were you ever forbidden to read certain books, and did your father put those books under lock and key? […]
Well, then. A husband is not so very different from a father after all. There is
a certain kind of knowledge I prefer you not to have. It’s better kept under
lock and key. So that’s that” (211).
Interestingly, and in sync with Abraham and Torok’s theory of intersubjective haunting that is always already textual, Maxim links the site of the
forbidden/secret knowledge of threatening female sexuality to locked-up
books, that is, to textuality. This move, however, instead of distancing the
narrator from forbidden knowledge by referring it to the realm of “inaccessible” textuality, seems only to facilitate her better understanding of it, as
Manderley is made a haunted place exactly by those objects and sites that
conflate writing and textuality with aspects of Rebecca’s uncontainable
femininity. Thus, to the narrator, Rebecca’s body and sexuality are most
closely accessible through an obsessive reading of her omnipresent handwriting, signature and initials, all of which function as indelible traces
inscribing her seductive corporeality.
Compared to the shy and inexperienced heroine’s childish handwriting, Rebecca’s writing is powerful and confident, described by the words
“strong” (du Maurier 1992: 37), “bold” (48), “assured” (48), “alive” (62), “full
of force” (62), a “symbol of herself” (48). On her first morning at Manderley
the butler informs the narrator that the late Mrs. de Winter used to start all
her days in the morning room, where she “did all her correspondence”
(87). The orderliness of her writing-table clearly associates Rebecca with a
124
highly competent, experienced writer. In her dedication to Maxim on the flyleaf of a book, she calls him “Max” (37), indicating her “power to name and
possess” (Horner and Zlosnik 1998:113). As the narrator ponders upon coming across this dedication: “Max was her choice, the word was her possession” (du Maurier 1992:48).
The letter “R” in her signature and initials, so powerful that it “dwarfs”
(37) the rest of the letters and is impossible to erase since it resurfaces as
embroidery, writing or engraving on various objects scattered in the house,
is another textual trace that invites an association with feminine corporeality and sexuality. As some critics of the novel observe, the capital “R” can
also be read as the graphic imitation of the curved lines of an overly sexual
female body (see Horner and Zlosnik 1998: 110, Lloyd Smith 1992: 302). The
uncontainability of femininity that Modleski attributes to both the novel and
Hitchcock’s filmic adaptation of the novel can best be grasped in how it
manifests itself through Rebecca’s signature and script. Elizabeth Grosz
contends that “there are ways in which the sexuality and corporeality of the
subject leave their trace or marks on the texts produced” and so “the signature not only signs the text by a mark of authorial property but also signs the
subject as the product of writing, […] of textuality” (1995: 21). What
Rebecca’s corporeal presence through her script makes explicit is how the
body and sexuality are not fixed and pre-given biological entities but are
always already defined by textuality and come into being as a result of a
process of discursive production. According to Grosz, signature “is the condition for endless repeatability […], perpetual openness to repositioning,
[…] capacity to be continuously re-read, re-written” (1995: 23). By telling a
different story about their “author” every time, Rebecca’s signature and
script comprise diametrically opposed extremes: they present her as the
ideal and loving wife, the perfect mistress of Manderley, the embodiment of
propriety and proper femininity, but at the same time they also inscribe her
overwhelming confidence, strength and autonomous sexuality, all of which
refer her more to the masculine pole in the binary structure of gender roles.
The femininity that haunts the novel and the film, Rebecca’s femininity, is
uncontainable because it is uncanny. As Shoshana Felman argues in her
seminal article “Rereading Femininity,” when femininity is uncanny “it is not
the opposite of masculinity but that which [uncannily] subverts the very
opposition of masculinity and femininity” (1981: 41). Rebecca becomes a
liminal figure because she “deals in undecidability” (Derrida 1981), flaunt-
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
ing the fictionality, textuality and consequent fluidity of gender categories
and sexual identity.
Her liminality and spectrality links this reading back to Abraham and
Torok’s notion of the “phantom” that they define as the unwitting reception
of someone else’s secret, an unsayable gap in another person’s speech that
works “like a stranger within the subject’s mental topography” (qtd. in Lloyd
Smith 1992: 281, also see Abraham and Torok 1994: 168). Rebecca does
indeed figure as an inarticulable void in Maxim’s speech: her name is a “forbidden word” (du Maurier 1992:42), and “he never talk[s] about Rebecca,
[…] he never mention[s] her name” (282). Such a gap, such a discontinuity of meaning in one’s speech naturally invites a compulsive wish to know
and generates an interpretative frenzy in others. Rebecca might actually be
called a reading effect: she becomes a haunting presence as a result of the
narrator’s desperate attempts to give meaning to Maxim’s secret. Due to
Maxim’s silence as regards the true nature of his marriage to Rebecca and
the ambiguity of the traces she can fall back on to decipher his secret, the
narrator understandably does her best to be able to refashion herself as the
ideal object of Maxim’s desire she assumes Rebecca used to be. Finally, in
the novel’s highly memorable costume ball scene, Rebecca’s phantom,
behaving like an incorporated “stranger” in the narrator’s “psychic topography,” gets virtually reanimated in and through the narrator’s body. With Mrs.
Danvers’s “kind” help the narrator unwittingly chooses to wear the replica
of the dress Rebecca wore at her last ball at Manderley. When, all dressed
up and ready to go down to meet the guests, the narrator takes a final look
at herself, she catches sight of a “stranger” in the mirror: “I did not recognize the face that stared at me in the glass. The eyes were larger […], the
mouth narrower, the skin white and clear? The curls stood away from the
head in a little cloud. I watched this self that was not me at all and then
smiled; a new, slow smile” (222).
In Women Who Knew Too Much Tania Modleski was the first critic
whose reading of Rebecca was based on the thesis that the story plays out
the “oedipal drama from the feminine point of view” (1988: 46), that is, it
dramatizes a woman’s problems of “‘overidentification’ with another
woman” (1988: 44). The female oedipal trajectory can be described as follows: for little girls (as well as for boys) the first object of desire is the mother. However, at the onset of the castration complex the mother would
undergo a devaluation (because she is castrated) and the little girl is expect-
126
ed to relinquish her mother as a desired object and to displace her desire
on the father, but at the same time she is required to identify with the now
devalued mother figure. For the novel’s narrator this powerful centre of
homoerotic desire and subsequent object of identification is obviously
Rebecca, often mediated through Mrs. Danvers (for an impressive reading
of the narrator’s oedipal trajectory through same-sex desire to identification
see Bronfen 2004: 37-48, Harbord 1996: 95-103).
Modleski’s insight, read parallel with the opening dream sequence of
the novel, which makes it unmistakable that the rest of the text is a nostalgic recollection of painful and traumatic events of the past, facilitates the
possibility of introducing the concept of melancholy into the present reading. Kaja Silverman argues (and with a slightly different emphasis Judith
Butler too) that women are constitutively melancholic. Caught in the double bind of simultaneously having to renounce (that is, lose) the mother as
a devalued (because castrated) object of desire, but also having to identify
with her, the daughter encrypts the mother’s imago that will continue to
inhabit and haunt her ego (Silverman 1988: 156-157).
The introduction of the concept of melancholy into this reading makes
it possible to bring together the various strands the paper has been focusing
on so far (unassimilable femininity, writing/textuality, identification/encryption). In the final dream of the novel the narrator dreams about herself writing as Rebecca:
I was writing letters in the drawing-room. I wrote them all myself with a
thick black pen. But when I looked down […] it was not my small square
handwriting at all, it was long, and slanting, with curious pointed strokes.
[…] I got up and went to the looking-glass. A face stared back at me that
was not my own. It was very pale, very lovely, framed in a cloud of dark
hair. The eyes narrowed and smiled (du Maurier 19992:396).
The narrative frame constituted by the opening and concluding dream
scenes of the novel attests to the fact that the older, melancholic narrator
has not abjected the figure of Rebecca. While Maxim is described as a dull
invalid consumed by mourning for the loss of his beloved Manderley and
England, the narrator, having been empowered by the incorporation of
Rebecca and her textual confidence and skillfulness, writes the secret, “forbidden [text] [she] was always looking for” (Horner and Zlosnik 1998: 127),
that is, the novel itself. And since her production of this melancholy text is
not only a means of dealing with melancholia by sublimating her loss aes-
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thetically but also an act of allegiance to the mother by way of inscribing
her, it guarantees that Rebecca’s uncontainable feminine spirit will not be
repressed and laid to rest.
References
Abraham, N. and Maria Torok. 1994. The Shell and the Kernel. Nicholas Rand (ed.).
Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Bronfen, E. 2004. Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Castricano, J. 2001. Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing.
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Derrida, J. 1981. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Du Maurier, Daphne. 1992. Rebecca. London: Arrow Books.
Felman, Shoshana. 1981. “Rereading Femininity”, in Yale French Studies, 62, pp. 19-44.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1995. Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies.
Harbord, J. 1996. “Between Identification and Desire: Rereading Rebecca”, in
Feminist Review, 53. pp. 95-107.
Horner, A. and Zlosnik, S. 1998. Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic
Imagination. London: Macmillan.
Lloyd-Smith, A. 1992. “The Phantoms of Drood and Rebecca: The Uncanny
Reencountered Through Abraham and Torok’s Cryptonymy’”, in Poetics Today,
13:2, pp. 285-308.
Modleski, Tania. 1988. The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist
Theory. New York: Methuen.
Silverman, Kaja. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and
Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
WILLIAM MORRIS’S
CHILD CHRISTOPHER AND GOLDILIND THE FAIR:
MEDIEVALISM AND THE ANTI-NATURALISM OF THE 1890S
CLAUDIA IOANA DOROHOLSCHI
Abstract: The paper examines the relationship between William Morris’s
Medievalist aesthetics and the other anti-naturalist trends at work in the 1890s,
by looking at his fantasy writing, particularly Child Christopher and Goldilind
the Fair. The way in which his text makes use of the generic markers of the
fairy-tale, its treatment of closure and of authorship and the use of
ornamentation all connect Morris’s writing to fin-de-siècle experimentation.
William Morris’s work holds a paradoxical place within the Late
Victorian environment. In the early 1890s, he was affiliated with a still very
much active second generation of Pre-Raphaelites, together with his friend
and collaborator Edward Burne-Jones. They were both advocates of an antiindustrialist stance — the first promoting the work of the craftsman to beautify an everyday life which was more and more damaged by the influence
of industrialization and the machine; the second seeking refuge in
medievalism and the legends of the Arthurian cycle. Morris’s aesthetics is
socialist, and, at least theoretically, it bestows a very utilitarian mission upon
literature and the arts. It argues that art is called upon to embellish the life
of the ordinary worker, which can have numerous benefits — among them,
better productivity. However, William Morris cultivates a medievalist aesthetic language which is at best escapist, if not downright anti-Victorian.
Both his literature and his designs are heavily aestheticized and formalized,
and promote a fin de siècle primacy of ornament which brings him closer
to the anti-referential stance of an Aubrey Beardsley than to the moralist and
realistic works of his generation of Pre-Raphaelites.
Thus, both his fiction and the work he produced in the field of arts and
crafts display this overlap between a Medievalist socialist aesthetics and the
anti-naturalist formalism which was to become one of the important
sources of the innovative vocabulary of forms of the 1890s. Morris’s fantasy
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writing, particularly Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (1995, first published 1895), illustrates this ambivalence. A Medievalist utopia, it makes use
of textual strategies which distance it from the conventions of Victorian realism and move in the direction of anti-naturalism and aestheticizing artifice.
In William Morris’s work, nature is seen almost exclusively through the
lens of medieval legend. He considers the Middle Ages a period that
“stands alone triumphant, the loveliest, brightest, and gayest of all the creations of the human mind and hand” (Morris 2002), one to which he intriguingly ascribes the status of an unlikely Socialist Golden Age, in which man,
not yet subject to the tyranny of the machine, was “not FORCED to work for
another man’s profit” and “was living in a society THAT HAD ACCEPTED
EQUALITY OF CONDITION” (Morris 2002). This freedom made the medieval
craftsman produce art for pleasure rather than commercial purpose — and
Morris gives this aesthetic pleasure a crucial role in his view on the function
of art. Art is called upon to embellish everyday life — and it does so by projecting the worker (for it is the working classes that Morris’s aesthetics persistently focuses on) outside his imperfect everyday environment. This is
why the socialist Morris produces not narratives of social decay like
Dickens, but fantasy stories and poems set in Chaucerian times; not paintings of street urchins and working class quarters, but elegant book bindings
and wallpaper designs.
The story of Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair is a fairy-tale of
admirable princely characters facing vicissitudes that eventually resolve into
a classical happy end. The two protagonists, orphaned and tricked out of
their fortunes and kingdoms, come together and find fulfilment in marriage
and in becoming enlightened rulers after regaining their castles and their
titles. The theme, but also the characterization and treatment of the plot
emulate medieval romances — or at least the Victorian fantasy of a
medieval romance. The book is not a militant socialist piece in disguise, at
least not in the sense in which Victorians conceived of social involvement.
Instead, it constructs a perfect escapist fantasy that projects the reader outside contemporary historical time, and into the illo tempore of the fairy tale.
The reader’s entry into the text is mediated by markers of the genre.
The story thus begins like a tale of Chaucerian times: “Of old there was a
land which was so much a woodland, that a minstrel thereof said it that a
squirrel might go from end to end, and all about, from tree to tree, and never
touch the earth: therefore was that land called Oakenrealm” (Morris 1995).
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The time and space are established conventionally: “of old”, “there was a
land…,” unambiguously marking the story as a tale. Such markers occur at
various points in the text as well: from time to time, new events are introduced by “Tells the tale that…”; shifts in the focus of the narrative or flashbacks are also not camouflaged for the sake of illusionism, but pointed out
for the sake of generic suggestiveness: “now the tale leaves telling of
Goldilind, and goes back to the matters of Oakenrealm, and therein to what
has to do with King Christopher and Rolf the Marshal” or “Goes the tale back
now to the time when the kingship of Child Christopher was scarce more
than one month old” (Morris 1995).
William Morris’s treatment of closure is also in consonance with what
readers would have expected from the genre. Child Christopher and
Goldilind the Fair ends with a restoration of the order initially perturbed by
betrayal and usurpation — the happiness of wealth and marriage is
bestowed upon the characters, together with a suggestion of a conflict-free
ever-after. This sets the moral record of the story straight, so to say, by confirming right and wrong through suitable retribution. The story wraps up in
the last paragraphs the rest of the protagonists’ lives, and ends with their
death in old age — in a manner which implies not the sadness of their passing, but the logical, natural closure of the narrative.
Consequently, the tale emphatically labels itself as a tale, laying bare
its scaffolding so that the reader may easily identify it as belonging to its
genre. The intertextual dimension is also clear; Morris’s aesthetic return to
the past is done in all earnestness and with no parodic intention, in an
attempt to offer an aestheticized, beautified fictional alternative to his contemporaries, presumably assaulted by the ugliness of everyday life. In this
sense, Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair is about other stories more
than it is about the world or human nature — it is literature about literature,
intertextual rather than referential.
Another interesting dimension of Morris’s anti-realism is the way in
which his story encodes the position of the author. Roland Barthes noted in
The Death of the Author (1967) that “the author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with
English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the
Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more
nobly, of the ‘human person.’ Hence it is logical that with regard to literature
it should be positivism, resume and the result of capitalist ideology, which
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has accorded the greatest importance to the author’s ‘person.’” When
William Morris advocates socialism and a return to an idyllic classless society based on a fantasy of the Middle Ages, he proposes a model of the artistcraftsman whose humanism is less individualistic, and voice far less
assertive than that of the Mid-Victorian writer. Morris’s craftsman is neither
the inspired genius of the Romantics, nor the professional truth-giver of the
Realists; neither the exceptional man (aristocrat or outcast) of the former,
nor the middle-class gentleman of the latter. Instead, he is a worker whose
increased time for leisure allows him to dedicate himself to the pleasure of
artistic expression (Morris 2002). Morris expects the ‘ordinary workman’ to
engage in artistic creation ‘while he is about his ordinary work,’ thus replicating what Morris believes is the democratic and quasi-spontaneous
‘Popular Art’ of the Middle Ages, one that ‘no longer exists now, having been
killed by commercialism.’ Artistic ability is supposed to be universal, and
equated with skill which can be fostered through education.
As a consequence of this theoretical position, in Morris’s literary and
visual work there is a traceable attempt at replicating the medieval model
of collective authorship, in which the artist perceives himself at most as a
craftsman whose personal identity is unimportant, and who frequently
works together with other craftsmen. Thus, at Morris’s workshop and printing press several artists-craftsmen often contribute to the same object, with
Morris himself usually in charge of the medieval-inspired decorative pattern, be it on a bookbinding, wallpaper, or piece of furniture, and other
artists contributing other elements. Morris worked closely with Burne-Jones
in illustrating the books his printing press produced in the 1890s, with the
former producing the ornamental borders and initials, and the latter usually in charge with the illustration itself. Moreover, although Morris’s name features prominently in medieval-looking font on the frontispiece of his literary
works, and as a brand name on the books produced by his printing press,
many of the objects remain unsigned. Authorship is a collective effort, one
which idealistically brings together the creative efforts of equals. That the
Morris brand achieved such fame and that, instead of vanishing behind his
craftsmanship, ‘Morris’ eventually became a name used on mass produced
objects more than a century later betrays just how idealistic Morris’s theory
was.
As for Morris’s literary work, it is hardly surprising that he turns towards
the folk tale and legend as a favoured genre, especially in what his 1890s fic-
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tional work is concerned. In Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair, he
replicates the neutral voice of the folk tale, whose shared authorship gives
it a collective, traditional authority — not one based on the genius or truthfulness of one single writer, but one that sounds as if legitimized by having
been told and retold by a community of storytellers over centuries. Morris
as a Victorian vanishes entirely behind the medieval mask, with hardly any
authorial intervention in the text. On the one or two occasions when authorial intrusion does occur in the narrative, Morris suitably employs the first
person plural, just like Hopkins’s journalists who replace a weakened individual authorship with the more legitimate authority of the editorial ‘we’
(DaRosa 1997: 829): “But now leave we Christopher and these good fellows
of the Tofts and turn to Goldilind…” (1995, Ch. 11), in a way which once
again suggests that the author is blending in with the whole community of
storytellers. It also signals complicity with the reader, but one which is less
the complicity that comes from shared moral values, as it used to be for the
earlier Victorians; instead, it seems to involve the reader in the same storysharing community, in which the voice that tells the story is less important
than the story itself.
Moreover, one of the instances of authorial presence in the text is one
that actually weakens rather than strengthens the position of the author, by
emphasizing, in the same first demure first person plural, a limitation in
knowledge: “Now as to Squire Simon, whether the devil helped him, or his
luck, or were it his own cunning and his horse’s stoutness, we wot not” (Ch.
9). The text is pervaded by a lack of authorial assertiveness, although this
weakening of the authorial position does not dramatically disrupt the
Victorian complicity between author and reader. Although the authorial
presence is discrete and muted, the story still unfolds against the backdrop
of shared values, with no ambiguity as to what the moral stance towards
characters and situations should be. The fairy tale structure serves Morris’s
socialist ideas in that it allows him to make his statement in a way which
seems natural, commonsensical, and universally recognizable. The author
is not needed in the text, as he speaks with the voice of communal tradition. He does not need to be an assertive presence, as the text stands on its
own, as if ready to be perpetuated by the next generation of storytellers.
This weakening in authorial position is a feature omnipresent in the
work of the more experimental writers of the 1890s. What Oscar Wilde
achieves through self-contradiction and Max Beerbohm and Aubrey
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Beardsley achieve through irony, William Morris achieves through his
recourse to the medieval model: an authorial voice which is no longer that
of an ultimate authority. This is a significant development in 1890s fiction as
it moved away from Victorian realism, and is symmetrical in later authors
with a movement towards ambiguity and towards encouraging a more
active, imaginative role of the reader in the process of meaning creation.
But perhaps the most striking anti-realist element in the story is
Morris’s use of ornamentation. Victorian novels and paintings, with their
commitment to realist principles, have little space for ornament. Narrative
elements are subordinated to a goal, more often than not fulfilling a structural function, or contributing to a common effect. Function and ornament
are separate entities, which undermine each other in both art and day-today activities. In Ruskin’s words, “you would not put rings on the fingers of
a smith at his anvil” (1991: 247).
For Morris, on the other hand, ornament is essential in creating a necessary aesthetic dimension for everyday life. In Signs of Change, he gives a
reading of the dichotomy between work and leisure that is radically different from Ruskin’s. He suggests that more leisure is essential for the welfare
of the worker in a society based on socialist principles rather than on relentless pursuit of profit — and that more leisure means more time for education, and for artistic manifestations. Moreover, good working conditions,
improved education, and sufficient leisure time would trigger pleasure in
the work itself — and a desire to express it through art: “Then would come
the time for the new birth of art, so much talked of, so long deferred; people could not help showing their mirth and pleasure in their work, and
would be always wishing to express it in a tangible and more or less enduring form” (Morris 2002).
This is clearly a utopian vision of both society and the functions of art
— but it provides the backbone of Morris’s conception of ornament and the
Arts and Crafts movement, which, in their turn, have a determining influence on the later (far more gratuitous) use of ornament in the 1890s. Morris
argues that “the material surroundings of my life should be pleasant, generous, and beautiful” — that beautifying the environment is a prerequisite of
welfare. He dreams of the public buildings of the future, “unsparing of materials, generous in worthy ornament, alive with the noblest thoughts of our
time, and the past, embodied in the best art which a free and manly people
could produce” (Morris 2002). Ornament is “worthy” —an adjective that
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combines the positive connotations of suitability and quality with a hint of
the moral, yet a morality that does not reside as much in a sense of message as in beauty itself. Even if the social impact of this utopian art theory is
questionable, the impact on later artistic developments, particularly Art
Nouveau, is crucial. Moreover, the blurring of the boundary between ornament and function opens a range of new possibilities with structural experimentation.
The 1890s cultivation of ornament is in direct proportion with their
rejection of realism. As Criticos (2004: 202) notices, “‘mimetic’ realism in an
artistic or literary work usually appears in an inverse ratio to its ‘decorative’
character, manifested as formalism, stylization, abstraction or symbolism.”
Fin de siècle rebellions against mimetic referentiality are accompanied by a re-reading of the functional and structural role of ornament. If for
earlier ages ornament (defined as structurally dispensable aesthetic addon) was primarily a way of embellishing everyday objects and interiors, and
giving stylistic unity and elegance to architecture, making occasional
appearances in painting and in poetry, for 1890s artists (especially those of
Art Nouveau sympathies) ornament became more and more integrated into
the structure of architecture and objects, and penetrated graphic arts, painting, and even fiction, in unprecedented ways that allowed alteration of, and
experiment with the very structure of the work, with narrative, spatiality,
abstraction, symbol, and the centrality of subject matter.
For the average Victorian writer, literature is ‘about’ something, and it
is this sense of ‘aboutness’ that ornament may have interfered with. For
William Morris, on the other hand, ornament and beauty are almost synonymous, and an important means of connecting the work to the medieval aesthetic language — and simultaneously to the social utopia of the Middle
Ages that he is attempting to project. His furniture, his wallpapers, the books
that come out of his printing press are all heavily adorned with floral and
geometrical patterns derived from those in medieval illuminated manuscripts or Gothic cathedrals. Interlacing tendrils, vegetal arabesques, ornate
initials are omnipresent, building a visual bridge to the Golden Age of
Morris’s theories. Their function is primarily to beautify the objects, while
abstaining from any dramatic interference with their functionality. In everyday objects, as in drawings and fiction, ornamentation remains primarily
aesthetic, and does little to disrupt conventional ways of constructing narrative and space. Thus, in book illustrations like the ones he produced with
136
Burne-Jones, the pictorial space is accompanied, framed, and qualified as
medieval by Morris’s ornamental frame, but not modified structurally.
Ornament does not interfere with the picture, but establishes a discrete dialogue with it. It is the case of the Kelmscott Chaucer edition (1896), in which
Morris’s frame and ornamental initials and Burne-Jones’s illustrations cooperate in re-creating a suitably Medieval environment for the text to unfold,
yet are kept apart in distinct fields on the page, echoing each other, but
always respectful of boundaries.
More interestingly, in his fictional work, Morris uses stylistic ornament
alongside theme and narrative pattern to anchor his work in the medieval
tradition. The vocabulary he employs in Child Christopher and Goldilind the
Fair is an entirely artificial invention, and functions as an ‘add-on’ to contribute to the ‘medievalising’ of the text: “Tells the tale that [the King of
Oakenrealm] rued not his bargain, but loved [his wife] so dearly that for a
year round he wore no armour, save when she bade him play in the tilt-yard
for her desport and pride. So wore the days till she went with child and was
near her time, and then it betid that three kings who marched on
Oakenrealm banded them together against him, and his lords and thanes
cried out on him to lead them to battle, and it behoved him to do as they
would” (Morris 1995). The language is deliberately archaic, and clothes the
text in a medieval-like surface, in which syntax (“rued not his bargain”), old
verb forms (“betid”), and obsolete words contribute to reviving a lost world.
Morris’s story is a construct of great artificiality, which is in a sense
mimetic — but mimetic of a former literature rather than of anything in the
outside world. The narrative, constructed as it is according to patterns of
tale and legend, and adorned with elements of an almost outlandish linguistic invention, is quite manneristic, and its flamboyant style is not dissimilar
to what would have appealed to a Des Esseintes. However, ornament is still
subsumed to the overall structural effect, acting in an additive rather than
disruptive manner. It helps underline the archaic features of the story, but it
does not change the way in which the story is told.
Typically fin de siècle artists such as Beardsley are different in the
sense that ornament becomes the subject and interferes with the composition; Beardsley’s fiction (most significantly his unfinished novella The Story
of Venus and Tannhauser, 1995 [1907]) is to a certain extent similar to
Morris’s, in that it is an escapist fantasy that structurally and stylistically mimics the generic conventions of a previous age, and that it feels heavily
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‘adorned’ with stylistic effects meant to enhance the atmosphere. But while
in William Morris the ornaments are discrete, functional, and subsumed to
the narrative movement, in Beardsley they acquire a life of their own, and a
centrality which ultimately supersedes that of the characters and the plot.
Thus, even if it does not yet trigger any major disruptions in aesthetic
language, William Morris’s medievalism contributes to the experimentalist
trend which culminates in the work of major 1890s innovators like Wilde
and Beardsley, opening the path towards a hedonism of creation and
towards an aesthetics of pleasure. The craftsman who takes advantage of
the increased leisure brought by the age of machinery, and who thus produces art for his own pleasure, and that of his community, is one of several
ancestors of the 1890s artist for whom aesthetic pleasure has become the
sole purpose of art. If Morris’s aesthetics of pleasure retains a utilitarian
dimension, it helps provide the framework within which the fin de siècle
arrives at the quasi-complete rejection of utilitarianism.
References
Barthes, R. 1967. The Death of the Author. In Aspen, No. 5-6, Item 3. [Online].
Available: http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/ threeEssays.html#barthes
[1 December 2006].
Beardsley, A. and J. Glassco. 1995 (1907). The Story of Venus and Tannhauser. Ware,
Hertf.: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.
Criticos, Mihaela. 2004. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of
Ornament, in Irina Vainovski-Mihai (ed.). New Europe College. GE-NEC
Program 2000-2001, 2001-2002. Bucharest: New Europe College, pp. 187-219.
DaRosa, M. 1997. “Henry James, Anonymity, and the Press: Journalistic Modernity and
the Decline of the Author,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 43, No. 4, Winter 1997,
pp. 826-859. [Online]. Available: http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v043/43.4darosa.html [23 March 2007].
Morris, W. 1995 (1895). Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair. Gutenberg,
[Online]. Available: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/234 [15 July 2006]
Morris, W. 2002 (1888). Signs of Change. Gutenberg. [Online]. Available:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3053 [1. 08. 2006].
Ruskin, J. 1991. Selected Writings. Chosen and Annotated by Kenneth Clark.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
THE WHEEL OF DESIRE IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS
ANNIE RAMEL
Université Lumière-Lyon 2
Abstract: The paper examines the way in which the wheel of the mill in The
Mill on the Floss may serve as a metaphor to show how the text revolves
around a core of darkness, the void of the Lacanian “Thing”. The revolutions
followed by Maggie Tulliver make her pass imperceptibly from one type of
jouissance to another, as on a Moebius strip, until she is finally precipitated into
the central void.
It is evident that The Mill on the Floss is about a turning wheel: the
wheel of the Mill turns ceaselessly, “sending out its diamond jets of water”.
The story is about water, water which is channelled and diverted until the
banks finally break, and the signifier used by the father to define himself —
“I am nought but a bankrupt” (Eliot 1998: 261) — is taken to the letter. Such
is, in a condensed form, my reading of the tragedy of Maggie Tulliver. Water,
it seems, is immensely precious and desirable. Tulliver will never accept to
lose one drop of it, and he will fight a losing battle in a vain attempt to keep
entire his ancestral rights on it. True, water means life for the miller’s family. Yet it also means death, and most surprisingly, if we pay attention to the
text, we find that death is precisely what is desired most. The narrator
makes a strange confession in the first chapter: he is “in love with moistness”, he envies the white ducks “that are dipping their heads far into the
water” (8), a fact which cannot fail to arrest our attention in a novel whose
two main characters will be drowned in the final flood. The adjective
“eager”, used in the first chapter (“their eager nostrils” 8) and again in the
conclusion (“eager voices” 521), makes us hear two meanings simultaneously, one causing the other to resonate like an echo: “eager” denotes
desire, but the word also calls forth its homonym “Eagre”, “the rushing
spring-tide, the awful Eagre, come up like a hungry monster” (41), the
devouring mouth of the furious stream that must needs swallow all living
things like an ogre. Nothing could be clearer: the desire that is evinced in
140
this novel is the death-drive — the desire to be engulfed in the tumultuous
waters.
The central question is, therefore, the question of desire. And, more
importantly, the enigmatic question of a woman’s desire: what does a
woman want? What does Maggie Tulliver want? One possible way of
addressing the question is by looking at the scene in the final chapter when
Maggie chooses between two options (to say yes to Stephen or to renounce
happiness), just before water starts flowing into the house. Maggie’s choice
is in fact between two voices, which are both silent “literary” voices:
Stephen’s voice, heard by Maggie as she reads the letter he has sent her to
urge her to accept him (“She did not read the letter: she heard him uttering
it, and the voice shook her with its old strange power” 514), and a voice that
returns to Maggie from the past, along with other memories, a voice “out of
the far-off middle ages” (291) that proceeds from the reading of The
Imitation of Christ (a book by the mystical monk Thomas-à-Kempis, which
Maggie read assiduously and rapturously in adolescence). That second
voice is far more difficult to define and situate, for it comes from no living
human being, it is relayed to Maggie through another silent voice (the
“strong pen-and-ink marks” made by “some hand, now forever quiet”,
which had annotated the book and “pointed” at some key-passages). This
voice, between the “low voice” of the author and the “quiet hand” guiding
the reader, has an “in-between” quality, it cannot be properly subjectivized.
And it is precisely that voice which is chosen by Maggie:
She sat quite still, far on into the night: with no impulse to change her attitude, without active force enough even for the mental act of prayer: only
waiting for the light that would surely come again. It came with the memories that no passion could long quench: the long past came back to her
and with it the fountains of self-renouncing pity and affection, of faithfulness and resolve. The words that were marked by the quiet hand in the little old book that she had long ago learned by heart, rushed even to her
lips, and found a vent for themselves in a low murmur that was quite lost
in the loud driving of the rain against the window and the loud moan and
roar of the wind: “I have received the Cross, I have received it from thy
hand; I will bear it, and bear it till death, as thou hast laid it upon me”
(515).
The passage betrays the unquenchable desire which urges Maggie to
act as she does. What the text says here is that confronted with a choice
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between “passion” and the renunciation preached by the mystical monk
Thomas à Kempis, Maggie chooses the second option, not out of a sense of
duty or because it is more reasonable to do so, but because she follows her
desire, because the force that impels her to sacrifice herself is much
stronger than passion. The use of the word “quench” is extremely significant in this respect, for it implies a very strange hierarchy of desires, in
which passionate love seems powerless to “quench” a desire of another
kind, a much stronger desire: normally, it is the fire of passion that has to be
“quenched” (one says “to quench a fire”). Here, it is the other way round,
renunciation appears as that very irrepressible desire which passion is powerless to counteract. This strange inversion of common logic shows that
Maggie’s line of conduct is not produced by the repression of her desire.
Another point has to be made: for the voice which makes itself heard
to Maggie penetrates her until the words rush up to her lips and become her
own voice: in the final quotation, the shifter “I” refers either to Maggie, who
accepts to bear her cross, or to the speaker in The Imitation of Christ (whoever he may be). Maggie’s murmur becomes one with the sound of the driving rain and the “moan and roar of the wind”—and isn’t the word “vent”, in
its French sense, an echo of “wind”? The murmur has turned into a floating,
spectral voice, totally untraceable, impossible to subjectivize, a correlate of
the “voix acousmatique” spoken of by Michel Chion in film theory:
The voice which transgresses the boundary outside/inside, since it
belongs neither to diegetic reality nor to the external vocal accompaniment, but lurks in the in-between space, like a mysterious foreign body
which disintegrates from within the consistency of “reality” (Z̀íz̀ék 2001:
120).
This voice, chosen by Maggie in preference to the human voice inviting her to some earthly form of happiness, this flux of sound-waves which
works as a prelude to the gushing forth of destructive waters, is inextricably
bound up with the death-drive at work in the novel. It tells us that the innermost desire of the heroine is to erase all borders, to break the banks so that
the daughter of a “bank-rupt” father may be engulfed in the tumultuous
waters in an embrace never to be parted.
Let me hasten to add that this reading of the resolution of The Mill on
the Floss is anything but orthodox. Critics have almost unanimously seen
the end of the novel as an illustration of “The Religion of Humanity” in
which Eliot believed, a religion inspired by Feuerbach’s Essence of
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Christianity (which Eliot had translated into English in 1854) and by Auguste
Comte’s positivism (in which, by the way, Virgin and child form a central figure). In this perspective, Maggie’s renunciation springs from a “Christ-like,
self-sacrificing love” (Paris 1965: 167-68), it may be called sublime in the
sense that it represses the passion she feels for Stephen, and denies the
desire that might have found consummation in marriage. In Kantian terms,
the meaning would be that a supreme moral law triumphs over the drives
of an individual. I wish to take issue with this interpretation, and argue that
the “oblatory sacrifice” Maggie agrees to is a choice prompted by her own
desire — a woman’s desire.
Another passage may help us go a little further on this question: the
one that relates the legend of the Virgin of St Ogg’s. The Virgin of St Ogg’s is
depicted as a woman in rags carrying a child in her arms, a woman
emblematic of lack and desire. She entreats the boatmen to ferry her across
to the other side of the river. What is her desire? Why this stubborn desire
to cross the river though night is falling and the winds are high? That is the
question the boatmen ask her: “Wherefore dost thou desire to cross the
river? Tarry till the morning, and take shelter here for the night: so shalt thou
be wise, and not foolish.” (Eliot 1998: 116) The woman in rags chooses not
to listen to the voice of reason, she will be unreasonable, she goes on
entreating the boatmen to ferry her across: “Still she went on to mourn and
crave.” The surprising thing is that her desire is a desire without an object:
to the question “wherefore dost thou desire…”, she gives no answer, she
cannot tell what is so desirable on the other side. What does she want?
Nothing (rien in French, from the latin rem, the thing). Her desire is desire
in the pure state, the desire for nothing. Could it be the desire for the lacanian Thing? A few lines further, “Ogg the son of Beorl” accedes to the request
of the Virgin: “I will ferry thee across: it is enough that the heart needs it”
(116). What a strange use of the pronoun “it”, which has no antecedent,
which refers to nothing. The antecedent of “it”, which is missing in the syntax, opens a hole in the text, and bears witness to some irreducible opacity.
Could that woman’s desire (“the heart’s need”) be a heart of darkness? A
sudden metamorphosis turns the woman in rags into a resplendent vision
of the Virgin and Child:
And it came to pass… that her rags were turned into robes of flowing
white, and her face became bright with exceeding beauty, and there was
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a glory around it, so that she shed a light on the water like the moon in its
brightness (116).
“It” has ceased to be the unrepresentable of a woman’s desire, but it
now stands for the Virgin’s face surrounded with her glory, shedding all
around a light like moonshine.
It, a figure of mystery, a heart of darkness or a celestial body encircled
with a halo, is the pivot around which the text revolves: it may be heard
again in “thou… wast smitten with pity” (117), then the vision vanishes
when lack and desire are restored. The Virgin has blessed the boat of Ogg,
the son of Beorl, and promised that whoever steps into his boat “shall be in
no peril from the storm”; but when Ogg dies the blessing is ended (“But
when Ogg the son of Beorl died, behold, in the parting of his soul, the boat
loosed itself from its moorings, and… was seen no more” 117). The signifiers of the text speak of parting and severance (“parting”, “loosed”), the
vision is now seen only intermittently, and loss is conveyed to the reader
through a poetic play on words which substitutes “moorings” and “no
more” for the plenitude of “moon”. This surprisingly poetic passage seems
to proceed through paronomasia, shifting from “moaning”, “morning”,
“mourn”, at the beginning, to “moon” (the luminous disk which comes to
mask “it”, the heart of darkness around which the text is organized), then
on to “moorings” and “no more” through which return to lack and desire is
achieved. The story, after all, is only a legend, i.e., something “legible”,
something that may be read, and it is but the reflection of some unbearable
brilliance: “this legend, one sees, reflects from a far-off time the visitation of
the floods.” Access to the heart of darkness (“it”) is given indirectly, obliquely. We have revolved around a void, and the poetic resonances of the text
may be due to the proximity of the void — for, as Z̀íz̀ék (1996: 93) argues,
“resonance always takes place in a vacuum.”
Let us now turn to a definition of the sublime object given by Slavoj
Z̀íz̀ék:
The possibility of positioning an object relative to the drives arises because
of what Lacan terms “The Thing”. The Thing is a pressure-point that lies
just outside the symbolic and imaginary orders, where the weight of the
real is sensed. It is a place of menace, because it is where the deadly
impulses of the drives are gathered… An object aligned with this point is
said to be raised “to the dignity of the Thing”. Rather like an eclipse, when
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a heavenly body becomes positioned between us and the sun, and
appears surrounded by an aura of light so intense that we could never look
directly at it, an object located in this way between us and the unsymbolizable Thing becomes as though irradiated by the drive, bathed in jouissance, transfigured, spiritualized and resplendent. Objects positioned in
this way are referred to as “sublime” (Kaye 2003: 53-54).
When the Virgin’s face becomes “bright with exceeding beauty”, with
a halo surrounding it, she becomes exactly this: an object aligned with the
pressure-point of the Thing (figured in the text by the pronoun “it”), that is
masking the Thing, but also producing spectral effects all around, “in the
likeness of one of these misty haloes that are sometimes made visible by
the spectral illumination of moonshine” (Conrad 1990: 138). Similarly, in the
drowning scene, the personal pronoun “it” — “It is coming, Maggie!” (Eliot
1998: 521) — has no clearly identifiable referent, and the plu-perfect narrative carefully skirts round the extatic moment that unites brother and sister
in death — the vanishing point between a before and an after. The keel
appears after the boat has capsized: “the boat reappeared, a black speck on
the golden water” (521). All around this “black speck”, this “pressure point”
with the Thing (this punctum, as Barthes (1980) would say), the surface of
the water is suffused with golden light. Z̀íz̀ék’s definition of the sublime
object seems most relevant in this passage, which calls up again the vision
of the Virgin of St Ogg’s surrounded with her glory. Maggie, who in the rescue scene is identified with the Virgin of St Ogg’s, is indeed a “sublime
object” in Z̀íz̀ék’s sense.
That The Mill on the Floss is constructed around a void is a reality that
may be apprehended by resorting to the image of a wheel, a wheel of
desire. Nestor Braunstein uses a similar metaphor (1992: 83) to describe
“the eternal return of the drive” around the central void of the Thing. The
area of the Thing is the locus of the unnamed jouissance, “the fascinating
and dangerous seat of a lethal enjoyment”, the place where “the empire of
Thanatos lies, where eagles fear to venture, into which Antigone steps
down to find her grave, the life in her still palpitating” (Braunstein 1992: 8385). I wish to show how in The Mill on the Floss the drive revolves around
this central void, until the heroine, like Antigone, makes the tragic choice of
a descent into the abyss. For if we consider the novel as a whole, we see
that the narrative follows a circular movement around a heart of darkness.
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The starting point of the novel is the paradise of childhood — the daisied
fields where brother and sister are supposed to roam together. Then this
paradise is lost when Mr Tulliver is ruined, and then Maggie discovers the
asceticism preached by Thomas-à-Kempis in The Imitation of Christ.
Reading this book causes Maggie (like George Eliot) to go through a mystical crisis as she enters adolescence. She has somehow replaced her brother with Thomas-à-Kempis, whose name is conveniently the same as Tom’s,
and who is a “brother” too because he belongs to a religious order (Eliot
1992: 291). Then Maggie meets Philip, another brother figure, who convinces her to renounce the asceticism of Thomas-à-Kempis, but whom Tom
sees as a rival and banishes from his sister’s life because he is the son of Mr
Tulliver’s mortal enemy. Book V ends with Mr Tulliver’s death and a reconciliation scene between Maggie and Tom (“’Tom, forgive me — let us
always love each other’; and they clung and wept together” 359).
Book VII (the beginning of volume III in the Victorian three-decker)
takes Maggie into a totally different adventure: for this time it is love for a
man (not a brother) that is felt by Maggie, a mad passion for a fairly colourless character, Stephen. Eliot was much criticized for this episode which
seems to come out of the blue, and which the novelist seems to handle with
very little conviction. The true state of the case is, in my view, that Maggie’s
true desire is for something else than the consummation of a marriage that
would stem the tide of jouissance. Maggie’s final choice is the choice of a
jouissance beyond the phallus — beyond phallic enjoyment. Her choice is
a woman’s “act” as defined by Z̀íz̀ék:
Woman, taken “in herself,” outside the relation to man, embodies the
death-drive, apprehended as a radical, most elementary ethical attitude of
uncompromising insistence, of not “giving way as to” [her desire]. Woman
is therefore no longer conceived as fundamentally “passive” in contrast to
male activity: the act as such, in its most fundamental dimension, is “feminine.” Is not the act par excellence Antigone’s act, her act of defiance, of
resistance? […] Men are “active,” they take refuge in relentless activity in
order to escape the proper dimension of the act […] the death-drive as a
radical ethical stance (Z̀íz̀ék 2001: 156).
After her escape with Stephen down the river, borne along by the tide,
Maggie refuses the young man’s offer of love and marriage. She makes a
clear choice, sacrificing her happiness (and Stephen’s) for a tragic destiny
146
that takes her “beyond the pleasure principle”, a destiny that she hopes she
will be able to share with her brother — that irreplaceable being who is
most dear to her: dearer than Stephen, dearer than Philip, dearer than Lucy
(for whose benefit the sacrifice is apparently made). She flees to Tom, but
he rejects her violently. And it is at this very point that another form of enjoyment returns: the mystical jouissance experienced in adolescence when
she read The Imitation of Christ. This “resurgence” of her religious feeling is
immediately followed by the overflowing of the river, for the flood happens
at the very moment when Maggie remembers the words of Thomas-àKempis. It brings about the tragic dénouement, the reunion of brother and
sister in a deadly embrace. We have passed from Thomas to Tom, we have
come full circle, the return to the daisied fields of childhood is fully realized
in death. In fact, the narrative has followed a circular course from the first
to the last chapter, finally doubling back upon its beginning, after a number
of loops that have taken the heroine from Tom to Thomas, then from
Thomas to Philip (Tom’s double), with a return to Tom, a detour via Stephen
and a failed return to Tom, followed by a return to Thomas-à-Kempis, which
leads to a return to Tom. It seems we have done nothing but move in circles
in this untiring quest for the object of desire, which ends with Tom.
Once Maggie has renounced earthly happiness, the novel wavers
between two forms of enjoyment. The first is mystical enjoyment— for the
mystical experience lived by Maggie in adolescence is in essence a form of
the mystical jouissance that Lacan wrote about in Encore, that enjoyment
“beyond the phallus” that some women (like Teresa of Avila) can experience and yet know nothing about, a feminine enjoyment that could well be
the foundation of belief in God (Lacan 1975: 71). There is no doubt that the
reading of The Imitation of Christ sends Maggie into raptures, an ecstasy
from which she derives ineffable joy. If we read the text carefully, we cannot fail to understand what feelings are expressed:
In the ardour of first discovery, renunciation seemed to her the entrance
into that satisfaction which she had so long been craving in vain. She had
not perceived — how could she until she had lived longer? — the inmost
truth of the old monk’s outpourings, that renunciation remains sorrow,
though a sorrow borne willingly. Maggie was still panting for happiness,
and was in ecstasy because she had found the key to it. She knew nothing
of doctrines and systems, of mysticism or quietism, but this voice out of
the far-off Middle Ages was the direct communication of a human soul’s
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belief and experience, and came to Maggie as an unquestioned message
(Eliot 1998: 291, my italics).
“Panting for happiness” leaves us in no doubt as to the kind of emotion
involved. Strangely enough, the verb “to pant” reappears in the final scene
where it is associated with “joy”: “with panting joy she was there at last —
joy that overcame all distress — Maggie neared the front of the house”
(519).
It is very striking how the novel leads us imperceptibly from one type
of jouissance to the other, from mystical jouissance to tragic jouissance —
the absolute realization of desire “in the pure state” in the final deadly
embrace. In the last chapter, the flood seems to be caused by a “resurgence” of the mystical experience, as the “fountains of self-renouncing pity
and affection” turn into flooding waters. When water suddenly gushes forth,
it seems to spring from Maggie’s very body:
At that moment Maggie felt a startling sensation of sudden cold about her
knees and feet: it was water flowing under her. She started up — the
stream was flowing under the door that led into the passage. She was not
bewildered for an instant — she knew it was the flood! (515).
The continuity is metaphorically represented by the image of flux.
Tragic jouissance “springs” from mystical jouissance, which comes as no
surprise, for the pages about the mystical experience in adolescence have
insistently described the teachings of Thomas-à-Kempis as fountains (515),
as outpourings (“the old monk’s outpourings” 291), and Maggie’s experience as a stream (“an experience springing from the deepest needs” 292).
So, analysing the structure of The Mill on the Floss leads us to conclude that
the narrative both “turns”, ie moves in circles, and “flows” like the Floss, by
which I mean that mystical jouissance flows imperceptibly into the tragic
jouissance that engulfs brother and sister in the same fate.
Speaking of these two forms of enjoyment, Nestor Braunstein, argues
that “each is the other’s reverse side” (1992: 154). Although they have both
(rather misleadingly) been called “Jouissance de l’Autre” by Lacan, they
should be distinguished, and opposed to the third form, phallic enjoyment.
Admittedly, in the pages about Maggie’s mystical experience, we can see
that her desire is oriented toward “sublime heights”: “here was a sublime
height to be reached without the help of outward things” (Eliot 1998: 290);
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“to mount onto this height” (289); “too high a flight” (292). Conversely, tragic jouissance is oriented downwards, and draws Maggie towards depths
where she will finally be engulfed (“he fancied Maggie was slipping down a
glistening, green, slimy channel of a waterfall” 427; “brother and sister had
gone down in an embrace never to be parted 521”). Though mystical jouissance and tragic jouissance are oriented in opposite directions, the narrative makes them continuous, flowing from the former into the latter, in a circular movement that goes from the one to the other, then returns to its starting point, to be set off again on another revolution around the void of the
Thing. The topological figure of the Moebius strip is relevant here (a
Moebius strip being a loop whose outer and inner faces are in continuity
with each other, Braunstein 1992: 156-160). Tragic jouissance can be seen
as the inner face of the strip, which revolves around the central void — the
Thing — and feels its irresistible attraction; mystical jouissance is the outer
face, which is drawn not inwards to the centre, but outwards, being subjected to centrifugal forces that tend to carry it away from the centre. Though
oriented in opposite directions, the two faces form a unilateral surface.
Similarly, the wheel of Dorlcote Mill turns ceaselessly, moved by the
water of the human drive. Its revolutions are like those that the finger could
describe along a Moebius strip. When the heroine reaches the end of her
journey, tragic jouissance finally prevails, and she is precipitated into the
abyss, the void in the centre of the wheel of desire. Comic reintegration is
achieved in the conclusion, which restores the phallic order that the
Victorian age did not know how to do without. Catharsis has purged us of
our passions — of that Other jouissance whose effects may sometimes
prove destructive. Yet a few fragments of it are left for us to enjoy, or rather
a few droplets: the “diamond jets of water” sent out by the unresting wheel
of the Mill in its ceaseless revolutions, a metatextual representation of the
literary text, the little “surplus of enjoyment” which is both a precious jewel
and an object that is thrown out and lost, “floatsam and jetsam” scattered
abroad to the four winds. In The Mill on the Floss, these diamond jets of
water form like a misty halo, a luminous and tremulous shimmer around
the dark sun of the Thing.
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References
Barthes, R. 1980. La Chambre claire. Paris: Gallimard.
Braunstein, N. 1992. La Jouissance, un concept lacanien. Paris: Point Hors Ligne.
Conrad, J. 1990 (1902). Heart of Darkness and other Tales. Cedric Watts (ed.).
London: World’s Classics.
Eliot, G. 1998 (1860). The Mill on the Floss. Gordon S. Haight (ed.). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Kaye, S. 2003. Slavoj Z̀íz̀ék: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lacan, J. 1975. “Encore.” Le Séminaire XX. Paris: Seuil.
Paris, B. J. 1965. Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values. Detroit: Wayne
State UP.
Z̀íz̀ék, S. 1996. “’I hear you with my eyes’: or, The Invisible Master.” Gaze and Voice
as Love Objects, Slavoj Z̀íz̀ék & Renata Salecl (eds.), Durham & London: Duke
Z̀íz̀ék, S. 2001. Enjoy Your Symptom. New York and London: Routledge.
BARRY UNSWORTH AND THE HISTORICAL NOVEL TODAY
DANA PERCEC
Abstract: The paper looks at the evolution of the historical novel from the
romantic period to the contemporary age, observing the shift from the national
to the international, from local colour to diversity, from a nostalgic view of the
past to a touch of exoticism. The analysis of Barry Unsworth’s The Ruby in Her
Navel is trying to identify both the traditional elements of the genre
and contemporary tendencies displayed by it.
The success of Barry Unsworth’s latest book, The Ruby in Her Navel
(2006), a historical novel set in 12th century Sicily, during the Second
Crusade, draws special attention to the status and reception of historical fiction today. Its popularity seems to have been growing during the last
decade, with authors famous for other genres turning to history (John
Grisham or Amy Tan, for instance) or with Hollywood productions reviving
the public’s taste for historical drama (films like Gladiator, Shakespeare in
Love, Alexander the Great are only some of the most famous examples).
Moreover, a large number of historical novels have become best-selling
books all over the world in a very short period of time, confirming this tendency: Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999, set in 17th century
Holland), Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha (2005, set in early 20th century Japan), Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (2006, set during the American
Civil War), etc. Most of them have become even more appreciated after the
box-office success of their first-class, Academy-Award-winning film adaptations. Last but not least, the historical novels currently written are so numerous and varied that sub-genres have been identified to deal with the trend:
historical thrillers (Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Flanders Panel, 2003), pseudo-histories (Umberto Eco’s Island of the Day Before, 1995), multiple-time
novels (Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, 2000), time-slip novels (Barbara
Erskine’s Lady of Hay, 2000), to give only a few examples.
On the other hand, a critical opinion that has persisted over the
decades is that historical fiction is only a third-rate genre and this is why
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there are many authors who refuse to be called ‘historical novelists’ (this
may be, perhaps, an explanation for the numerous other names received by
this type of fiction, as mentioned above). Literary reviews labelling a novel
or its author as ‘historical’ may, more often than not, mean to be over-critical and use the term in a negative, ironic sense. The same novels quoted
above would, then, be announced by critics as ‘literary fiction’ or ‘contemporary women’s fiction’ when the intended verdict is a positive one. Good
plots set in the past are, therefore, rarely associated with the historical genre
as such even though — literally and not only — this is where they belong.
Nowadays, despite the growing public appeal, the genre’s respectability has
not changed substantially, the misconception being that historical fiction is
rarely done well, its reputation being rather one of costume melodrama,
with a crammed plot that lacks minimal verisimilitude, offering its readers
textbook knowledge rather than a wealth of imagination.
A possible way to account for this negative perception of historical
novels is the fact that, although writers have been dealing successfully with
the genre ever since the Romantic period, it has not, to the present day,
received a clear definition. Sir Walter Scott, the father of the genre, considered that novels had to be set at least two generations in the past for them
to be included in this category (Lukács 1989). Contemporary critics seem to
agree with Scott when expecting a book to be set fifty or more years before
its moment of publication in order to deem it historical. Despite the apparently unequivocal nature of these definitions, notions get more blurred
when a series of justifiable questions arise (Johnson 2004). For example,
what happens to novels which are partly historical, partly contemporary,
including a past and a present moment? Or what about a novel labelled
‘contemporary’ when it was published, which, a few decades later, should,
according to the same definitions, become ‘historical’? What about novels
in which fact and fantasy are blended: how much distortion of ‘real’ history
should be accepted for a story to become more ‘fantastic’ than ‘historical’?
Or what about a book whose action takes place in a moment that a certain
generation may regard as past, but another generation may not — such as
the Second World War? And what happens to novels set in a remote enough
past, but which are regarded by literary criticism and theory as (more) illustrative of another genre? And the list of questions could continue, increasing the confusion.
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In this context, the task of a writer choosing to produce high quality
historical fiction may seem completely unrewarding or, at least, a challenge
that may not necessarily be worth the trouble. Unlike other contemporary
authors who have signed books whose plot is set more than fifty years in the
past, but who claim to have written another type of fiction or accept the critics’ evaluation of their novels as other than ‘historical’, Barry Unsworth is
very determined both to acknowledge his fiction as historical and to continue to create new frames for this genre. The British writer already has a tradition in historical fiction, after he has signed a novel set in 14th-century
England (Morality Play, 1996), one dealing with the Atlantic slave trade
(Sacred Hunger, 1993), or one focusing on the decline of the Ottoman
Empire in the 19th century (Pascali’s Island, 1993). He is known for the solid
research work he is doing before embarking on the mission to write a new
historical book, research doubled by the experience gained from extensive
travelling (to France, where he completed his education, to Greece, Turkey,
or the US, where he taught for while, or to Italy, where he is currently
based).
The Ruby in Her Navel (2006) tackles a subject which may have a
rather disquieting relevance nowadays, in the context of the rising tensions
in the Middle East and of the West waging war against Islamic terrorism —
the shameful defeat of the Christian crusaders in front of the gates of
Damascus, in Syria, and the effects of this failed Second Crusade on the
political and cultural relations that had been established in the
Mediterranean region in the 11th and 12th centuries. The action is set in
Sicily, an island that had been conquered by the Normans, the most successful and efficient European warriors of the time. Upon their arrival, the
Normans found a territory divided between the Arabs and the Greeks,
whom the knights were practical enough to employ in crucial positions in
their new government: sea trade and art for the Byzantines, accountancy,
science and fashion for the Saracens. Latin, Norman French, Greek and
Arabic were all official languages in the state that became a kingdom under
Roger II, a nobleman whose personal history was one of multiculturalism
(born in Palermo of a French father and an Italian mother, he had been educated from an early age by both Greek and Muslim tutors). His artistic taste
and political vision soon transformed Sicily into a model of ethnic and religious tolerance, as well as one of cultural renaissance, after the centuries of
darkness and confusion that followed the fall of the Roman Empire and the
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barbarian invasions. An example for the entire European continent, the
kingdom of Sicily, Calabria and Apulia lasted for 64 years, before it was
included in the Holy Roman Empire, soon after the death of the last legitimate Norman king, William the Good (Drimba 1990).
For the contemporary reader, the history of Sicily is probably reduced
to the 19th century moment of the Italian unification, the Risorgimento,
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s posthumous 1958 novel The Leopard
(1991), and, of course, in a different, though more notorious register, the
birth and development of the Mafia. The history of Norman Sicily is completely forgotten. Barry Unsworth revives it in a flamboyant story —
romance and thriller at the same time — retelling the exploits of a young
Norman nobleman, Thurstan Beauchamp, in love with an Anatolian belly
dancer, Nesrin. The most powerful metaphor of the Sicilian model of tolerance and multiculturalism — one of the novel’s most important motifs — is
the chapel of the Royal Palace, commissioned by Roger II, under construction as the plot of The Ruby in Her Navel unfolds. The church seems to be
the best visual expression of the Norman advancement and the cosmopolitan project it proposes: the architecture is Romanesque, as in the case of
most basilicas in the Western European territory during that time; the decorations are Byzantine, with richly coloured, fine mosaics, encrusted by the
best Greek craftsmen, brought here by King Roger himself and generously
rewarded for their skill; the wooden roof and ceilings are in the purest
Islamic style, designed by famous Arab architects (“In the dimness above
me, hardly visible now but closely familiar from previous visits, was the Arab
stalactite ceiling in carved wood, with its painted scenes and Kufic inscriptions. Latin, Byzantine and Saracen had worked together here to make a
single harmony, to make this, though still unfinished, the most beautiful
church ever before seen in Palermo. There had been times when the interior had sounded to their separate languages and the chipping and hammering and scraping of their work”, Unsworth 2006: 27). Another mise en
abyme of the Norman ruler’s visionary, pluri-cultural policy is the Diwan of
Control, a sort of ministry of internal affairs, where Thurstan Beauchamp
himself works. Run by a Sicily-born Saracen, Yusuf Ibn Mansur, the Diwan
employs Arabs and Italians, Greeks and Normans, northern and southern
Europeans, papists and Byzantines, his scribes copying Latin, Greek and
Arab manuscripts (“his Douana, a model of races and creeds living in harmony”, 125).
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This unprecedented cultural, political and religious opening is brutally
terminated when the Franks are defeated at Damascus, all European rulers
seeing the clash of civilizations following this defeat as a necessity, if not a
reality. The Byzantines and the Arabs are expelled from Sicily and the existing rivalries between Latin and Greek, Christian and Muslim are exacerbated as never before. The decades of lively cultural exchange are over when
the Saracen and Byzantine scholars, so far admired and respected by the
Westerners, are forced to leave, taking their art and knowledge with them.
It will take a few more centuries for the Arab wisdom to be reintroduced in
Europe — through the Italian connection again — during the Renaissance
(Burke 2005).
Unsworth focuses on this moment of radical political transformation at
the level of the entire continent in a brief scene he sets, at the beginning of
the novel, in the chapel of the Royal Palace. Thurstan, a great admirer of the
Byzantine mosaics and their creators, pays regular visits to the church and
is quite close to Demetrius, the master mosaicist, who has arrived in
Palermo by personal invitation of King Roger. On one such occasion, he
learns from Demetrius himself that the Greek carvers will be replaced by
French and Italian craftsmen. The aesthetic despondency that seizes both
the Norman viewer and the Byzantine artist anticipates the political desolation that is to come, the acknowledgement of the advantages of multiculturalism being replaced by the awareness of the way in which cultural differences become manifest: “There is much to do still, but it will not be my people to do it, new people will be coming. We will finish the mosaics in the
sanctuary and the crossing because they do not want so evident a mixture
of styles, but we will be leaving before the end of the year. […] They are
Latins from the north, Franks. […] We have the wrong liturgy, the Latin
Christians will take our place. […] In all the time to come, while this church
stands, they will see where our work ended and their coarser work began.
That is a consolation to me, that it will be seen and known through all the
ages. […] You will have the decoration of the nave arcade, on both sides.
You will be obliged to keep to the Book of Genesis — that was agreed on all
hands when we started our work here. But you will turn it into stories. It is
all that you of the West know how to do. You go from left to right, from one
scene to the next, in a line. You have no understanding. God’s Grace is not
different from His power, they fall from above to below, one face of splendour, like the light. And this grace and power, what do you do with it? You
156
make stories. God creating light, a little figure in the corner, making a gesture, then we move on to the next scene. God lives in the light He creates,
but you do not know this, you make stories” (2006: 25-26)
The cosmopolitan touch of Barry Unsworth’s novel is apparent from
the very first page, in the international echo of proper names and locations,
unlike the traditional historical novel — such as Sir Walter Scott’s, again —
where the local colour prevails, justified by the romantic need to stir the
public’s patriotic feelings and instruct the masses about their ethnic heritage. The simple experiment of comparing the introductory chapters of
Unsworth’s The Ruby in Her Navel and Scott’s Ivanhoe and of drawing a list
of names would bear out this assumption. Therefore, on the one hand, in
the 2006 novel, we read about: Nesrin, the courts of Europe, Roger of Sicily,
the Caliph of Baghdad, the Great Khan of the Mongols, Palermo, Yusuf Ibn
Mansour, Corfu, Epirus, the Byzantine Fleet, Conrad Hohenstaufen, Manuel
Comnenus, Norman knights, a Saxon mother, the eunuch Martin, a palace
Saracen, Coloman, King of the Hungarians, Calabria, a Muslim lord
(Unsworth 2006: 1-2). On the other hand, Scott evokes an Anglo-Saxon territory that could be easily identified and mapped by his contemporary
English readership. Clichés about Englishness and superlative evaluations
of places, events and people abound: “In that pleasant district of merry
England which is watered by the River Don, there extended in ancient times
a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys
which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster. The
remains of this extensive wood are still to be seen at the noble seats of
Wentworth, of Warncliffe Park, and around Rotherham. Here haunted of
yore the fabulous Dragon of Wantley; here were fought many of the most
desperate battles during the Civil Wars of the Roses; and here also flourished in ancient times those bands of gallant outlaws, whose deeds have
been rendered so popular in English song” (Scott 2000: 1).
Another challenge Unsworth is prepared to face in his novel is his
choice of a first person narration. In the case of a Sicilian, 12th-century setting, the regular intricacies of the point of view are multiplied infinitely. The
author has to be very careful with the register, but also with a series of
every-day details that would be naturally expected in any narrative and that,
in this particular case, would be completely unfamiliar to the contemporary
reader. As far as register is concerned, Unsworth succeeds in offering a
chronicle-like voice, due especially to a peculiar word order he uses, which,
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still, keeps the text quite easy to follow and the reader’s mind alert: “When
Nesrin the dancer became famous in the courts of Europe, many were the
stories told about the ruby that glowed in her navel as she danced. Some
said it had been stolen by a lover of hers — who had gone to the stake for
it — from the crown of King Roger of Sicily, others that it had been a bribe
from Conrad Hohenstaufen for her help to kill the same king. […] Neither
of these two ever told the truth of it, no matter who asked, whether prince
or peasant. I am the only one who knows the whole story. I, Thurstan.”
(2006: 1)
Unsworth’s taste for colourful décors, as well as his vocation of an avid
researcher, can be easily detected in the descriptions that help us visualize
— often even smell and touch — objects, gestures, clothes, rooms, dishes,
urban designs completely unknown to the modern reader. This is, for
instance, a street in Palermo, whose depiction has a clear biographical
touch, being inspired by the author’s direct contact with the rural communities still unaffected by globalization, in the 60’s and the 70’s, in the
Mediterranean or oriental cultures he visited: “The water-sellers were calling with their high-pitched cries, their pails and dippers swinging from the
yoke and scattering drops that flashed as they fell and dried before the
marks could show […] There was the smell of spilled water round the
troughs of the pump near my house, a strangely strong odour, though made
from nothing but slaked dust and hot stones […] This was the time of day
when the street-sweepers came into their own; sweepers they called themselves, but they were scavengers in fact. They were out now in force, sacks
roped across their bodies” (2006: 19-20).
Especially keen on vestimentary details, Unsworth spends a lot of
energy describing clothes, haircuts, fabrics and shades of colour, the result
of a mixture between research on the period’s documents or drawings and
his own creative imagination: “Certainly he had dressed with care for the
visit: red tiara-shaped silk cap with a jewelled clip, pale blue wide-sleeved
silk gown, slashed at the shoulders to show the embroidered linen of his
tunic below. But this finery served only to emphasize the grimness and stiffness of his face, with its small, deep-set eyes and long nose and a mouth
that was like a thin cut in a lemon.” (129) Or: “I did not realize at once how
apparent it must have been to them that I was a stranger and more prosperous than those I stood among, did not realize how my tallness and my
clothes marked me out: I was dressed for traveling and so not richly, and I
158
wore no jewellery or fine brocade, but my pelisse was of black velvet and
my hat was one such as the Franks wear, of velvet too, and flat, worn low
over the brow” (68).
On other occasions, Unsworth’s evocations are plausible adaptations
of contemporary aspects to 12th century realities. Such an example could
be the description of the goldsmith’s shop: “These fruitless thoughts occupied my mind until I came to the little square close to the Buscemi Gate
where the goldsmith had his furnace. I watched him work for a little while,
hammering out softened gold to thin leaf on his anvil. […] He had a glass
counter with the things for sale in boxes below the glass, so that they could
be seen but not touched until he took them out. After some hesitation I
chose a garnet stone with a painted foil on the underside to make it glow. I
thought Sara could wear it on a chain round her neck, or have it set in a ring
if she chose. He asked three silver ducats for it” (21).
Unlike the traditional historical novel, the last lesson taught by
Unsworth’s The Ruby in Her Navel is one that has nothing to do with history and politics, but with aesthetics and artistic creation. In a world which,
despite the numerous centuries separating them, is not very different from
our own, where betrayal, cowardice and fear dissolve the vows of love and
honour, the only enduring value is art, the medieval hero finding his only solace in it after he has lost everything he ever deemed important in life. This
is the art of light and depth in the unfinished Byzantine mosaics, the art of
combining skill and imagination in the Arabic twin mirrors on the King’s
hunting island, or the art of eroticism and subtlety in the graceful moves of
Nesrin, the Anatolian belly dancer.
References
Burke, P. 2005. Renaºterea europeanã. Centre ºi periferii. Iaºi: Polirom.
Chevalier, Tracy. 1999. Girl with a Pearl Earring. London: Harper Collins.
Cunningham, M. 2000. The Hours. London: Picador.
Drimba, O. 1990. Istoria culturii ºi civilizaþiei, vol.3. Bucureºti: Editura ªtiinþificã.
Eco, U. 1995. The Island of the Day Before. London: Harcourt.
Erskine, Barbara. 2000. Lady of Hay. New York: Welcome Rain.
Frazier, C. 2006. Cold Mountain. Grove Press.
Golden, A. 2005. Memoirs of a Geisha. London: Vintage.
Johnson, Sarah. 2004. “What Are the Rules for Historical Fiction?”, on www.historicalnovelsociety.org
Lampesusa, G.T., Di. 1991. The Leopard. London: Everyman’s Library Classics.
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Lukács, G. 1989. The Historical Novel. London: Merlin Press.
Pérez-Reverte, A. 2003. Tabloul flamand. Iaºi: Polirom.
Scott, W. 2000. Ivanhoe. London: Penguin Classics.
Unsworth, B. 1996. Morality Play. London: Norton.
Unsworth, B. 1997. Pascali’s Island. London: Norton.
Unsworth, B. 1993. Sacred Hunger. London: Norton.
Unsworth, B. 2006. The Ruby in Her Navel. Hamish Hamilton: Penguin.
NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE IN THE EARLY NOVELS OF
PIERS PAUL READ
TERESA BELA
Jagiellonian University, Cracow
Abstract: The paper deals with the narrative methods and the role of the
narrator in three novels by P. P. Read: Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx (1966),
The Junkers (1968) and Monk Dowson (1969). The general analysis of the texts
is meant to illustrate how the changes in narrative method and perspective
help to unveil some of the main ideological issues of the twentieth century, as
well as the dilemmas of the modern man, caught between the dangers of
ideological commitment and moral nihilism.
The name of Piers Paul Read is not widely known to the reading public even in Britain, although his debut, regarded as both provocative and
promising, was very close to that of David Lodge. Since that time — i.e. 1966
— Read has written 14 novels, 3 works of non-fiction, one authorized biography (of the actor Alec Guinness), many TV plays, articles and essays, as a
contributor to The Spectator and other periodicals. He was also a sub-editor of TLS in the late sixties. The reasons for his limited popularity as a novelist in Britain are a separate and complex issue, not relevant here. Still, it is
appropriate to say a few things about him to contextualize the man and his
work, before the main topic of the present paper is dealt with.
Born in 1941 as one of the four children of Sir Herbert Read, the poet
and critic, Piers was educated in a Catholic boarding school in York, then
studied modern history at Cambridge and received a lot of ‘practical education’, travelling and working during and after his studies in various places in
Europe (France, Germany), America and the Far East. Quite early in his writing career he was given several ‘labels’, which have proved harmful to his
reputation as a novelist. The most important of these is that of ‘a Catholic
writer’. Although it is true that Read himself is a practicing Catholic and discusses the problems of faith and the Church in interviews (e.g., in Rowland
1999: 8) and personal essays (Read 2006: 13-146), and that some of his novels deal with problems related to Catholicism, in his work he has always
162
tried, successfully in my opinion, to be objective in the treatment of religious
faith as such and tolerant of other beliefs. He comes from a family where
religious differences were ‘daily bread’: his mother (who was of German
blood) was a Catholic convert, his beloved father was an agnostic. He and
his siblings are Catholic, but none of their children, although brought up as
Catholic, adhere to the faith of their parents, which is for Read the sign of
widespread religious indifference in Britain (in Rowland 1999: 8). Read’s
novels do not take a ‘moralising’ or ‘didactic’ Catholic stance, even though
they undoubtedly address problems related to serious moral matters.
Another label that has stuck to Read and has made him not very interesting to critics and publishers, is what is perceived as the traditional form
of his books, the lack of experimental literary technique, although it is
admitted that he can tell a good story, is “an entertaining storyteller” (Riley
1975: 380). In most of his novels there is a third-person omniscient narrator;
although not of an ‘intrusive’ kind, as was the case in the novels of the great
realists of the 19th century, e.g., in Tolstoy’s or George Eliot’s work, where
the omniscient narrator “offered further comments on characters and
events, and sometimes reflected more generally upon the significance of
the story” (Baldick 1990: 112). It is true that Read’s greatest novels are the
sagas covering large areas of 20th century history, whose objectivity and stable point of view may seem old-fashioned to contemporary readers with
postmodern tastes. Some of his other novels, e.g. The Married Man (1979),
which look like bitterly satirical novels of manners, are also generally traditional in their narrative technique. Another kind of the novel that Read has
practiced is a sort of thriller, often combining morality and politics, for
instance, espionage during the Cold War, as in A Patriot in Berlin (1995), or
Israeli attempts to discredit and destabilize the position of Palestinians and
Christians in order to achieve some national goals in On the Third Day
(1990). Such novels employ the first-person narration, since, obviously, the
narrator cannot be omniscient when the secrets of the plot and character
are not revealed until the end..
Although he is now seen as a ‘traditional’ writer, in his first three books
he used a conspicuously different narrative technique, perceived as either
‘experimental’, as was the case with his debut (Halio 1983: 623), or at least
as formally interesting. Apart from Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx (1966),
the next two novels that he wrote before he was 30, i.e., in the 1960s, combine the first and third person narration, introducing an unreliable narrator
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who tries to be objective (but he cannot, which is an important point for the
theme of the novel).
At this point the inevitable question arises: Was this interest in form to
do with the ambition of a young writer who wanted to be seen as an experimental author in the late sixties, the time when structuralism was becoming a fashionable critical method, drawing the attention of both writers and
critics to such issues as, for instance, narratology? Although such personal
reasons of the author cannot be entirely excluded and should be seen as
natural, it seems that there was more to it than the young man’s attempt to
please the critics and the reading public. The aim of this paper is to find this
additional factor; in other words — to address the problem of the narrative
technique in Read’s first three novels, all published in the 1960s. My claim is
that the choice of narrative technique in these novels is used as a means of
hiding the author’s own position in terms of beliefs and opinions, thus helping him to deal more objectively with difficult, complex or controversial
issues which were topical at that time. The three novels deal, respectively,
with the problem of Marxism and social revolution (Game in Heaven with
Tussy Marx, 1966), the problem of post-war Germany and its two radically
opposed political systems (The Junkers, 1968), and the problem of individual vocation in the light of the changes introduced to Catholicism by the
Second Vatican Council (Monk Dawson, 1969).
The story of Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx unfolds on two levels:
on the earth and in Heaven in the second half of the 20th century. The three
‘heavenly’ observers of the situation on the earth are a dowager duchess, a
young modern Englishman (who is the narrator), and Tussy (Eleanor) Marx
(1856-98), the youngest daughter of Karl Marx. They represent three different generations and outlooks upon the world. Tussy is the most serious
about social problems and the question of revolution. As she says herself,
her early life had been dedicated to two causes: the revolutionary socialism
of her father and the emancipation of women. Later she fell in love with
Edward Aveling, an English socialist, who drove her to commit suicide by
poisoning at the age of 42 with his constant infidelities and unbelievable
cruelty. (In the novel it is suggested by the narrator and Tussy herself that
she — although an atheist when she was on earth — is allowed to be in
Heaven because she had strongly believed in the ideas of revolution and
because she died of love.
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The young Englishman, “an ordinary bourgeois cad,” as Tussy calls
him (1966: 11), is the real narrator of the story which he tells at Tussy’s
request. The starting point of his narration is the scene they see on earth: a
long procession of people of all walks of life and all ages, somewhat like the
‘fair field of folk’ in Langland’s “Vision of Piers Plowman”. The people in the
procession are waiting and calling for a hero who would lead them to a revolution, a hero with a Saxon-sounding name — Hereward (‘historically a
leader of the Saxons against William the Conqueror’ [Halio 1983: 623]). The
people are:
[A]ll sorts whose lives have no aim; but they have the capacity to hope for
an idea in which to believe…They may not know what they want — their
instincts are clogged by customs no longer related to the form of their society — but know that it is time for a change, time to shed one skin and grow
another […] they need a revolutionary hero, one appropriate for the time
they live in (Read 1966:15).
The hero does not exist yet, people are shouting into thin air. There is
no sign of any Hereward, but, as Tussy suggests, “we can pretend that he
exists.” She tells the narrator: “You can invent him. It will be a game for us
to play. It will be a story for me…” (8).
In this novel Read introduces themes which will mean much to him in
later work, too: the emptiness of secular society, the danger of general
acceptance of sexual permissiveness, the importance of marital fidelity, as
well as a strange connection between Communist and Christian ideals —
hence the opinion that the novel is a “Catholic Marxist” one (Woodman
1991: 97). What is characteristic, however, of this narration is its ironic tone,
which is made possible by the employment of the unusual narrative technique: the story taking place in Heaven (mostly commentaries and memories of the three characters) and the omniscient narration about Hereward’s
life, his corruption by another socialist leader and evil character, George
Watkins, the later experiences of this ‘revolutionary’, and an almost comic
happy ending: Hereward’s re-union with his wife who, unaware of many
marital betrayals which constituted the essence of her husband’s frequent
‘revolutionary’ trips all over the world, is proud to be his wife: “‘Would I
have married you, I wonder,’ Miranda asked Hereward, ‘if I had known you
were a revolutionary? […] Now that I know, I imagine that I would have
done. I cannot remember when I was not the wife of an English revolutionary” (Read 1966: 151).
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A lot of space for irony is created just by Read’s sophisticated narrative
technique in this novel. The nameless English narrator — who had died in
a car crash, but is in heaven since he, as he says, “‘went to Church on
Sundays,” (7) — has to explain things to Tussy, who is very serious and idealistic about revolutionary matters and does not understand that there are
no parallels between her world and the world of the English ‘conventional
revolutionaries’ of the second half of the 20th century. On the other hand,
the narrator has to also enlighten the Duchess, who in her social blindness
did not and does not see any need for social changes: “Life seemed all right
to me” (15); “We treated our tenants very well” (152). Her remarks, however, are useful as a satirical tool since she is usually quite commonsensical
and assertive in her opinions, e.g., “An English revolutionary is an improbability” (151). Both she and Tussy, although for different reasons, disapprove
of the way Hereward behaves as a revolutionary — he marries a rich girl,
becomes the father of a few children, and, like a typical ‘English revolutionary,’ is constantly on the run from home, having many affairs with married
and unmarried women and using political jargon most of the time: “‘Why
must he hide his feelings like that?’, [the duchess asks the narrator who
replies]: ‘He has to use the idiom of his time; otherwise no one would
understand him; he will seem ridiculous’” (21).
On the other hand, the narrator points out a very important message
for the modern age: “If the times reduce Hereward to speaking the truth in
tones of irony, cynicism and contempt, he will still be speaking the truth.”
(21). This remark may be the answer to the question why Read himself
speaks of such important matters in an ironic, or even frivolous way. To
speak about the issue of revolution and of Marx’s daughter in serious tones
in the 1960s would be propaganda for some and gospel for others, and the
majority would hiss at the author with dissatisfaction. Perhaps this is the reason why in this and in his later novels of the 1960s Read, like Hereward, did
adopt the idioms of his times, making his narrators resort to the ways and
expressions of cynicism, nihilism, social and biological determinism, thus
keeping all his options open and playing games with his readers. In this way
— mainly thanks to his narrative techniques — he veils both fiction’s truth
and his own truth about the matters that were important to him and his generation in the 1960s, the time of the social unrest of the young people in the
West..
166
Read’s second novel, The Junkers (1968), is an ingenious study of the
century’s great symbol of evil, i.e., Nazism. Its special quality is that it
also “plays upon a paradigm of comedy” (Halio 1983: 624) with the love
story and a happy ending after many obstacles that the lovers have to overcome. However, the narrative technique allows the author to make it a very
serious story as well, “a complex horror story,” as Halio calls it (1983: 624).
The narrator, also a nameless Englishman, similar to Read in age (the novel
begins in 1963), takes pride in stereotypical English virtues like fair play and
open-mindedness, even about the elder generation’s concerns with the
horrors of World War II, but it is obvious that he is a rootless hedonist, an
aesthete and sensualist at the same time, and an unconcerned expert in
German finances and history, who works as an advisor to the British commander in Berlin. His job is to investigate the past of Klaus von
Rummelsberg, one of the group of Pomeranian Junkers, who, although an
ex-Nazi, is becoming a political leader, which worries the Allied authorities.
The research into the past of the three Rummelsberg brothers and their
friends constitutes a separate, ‘historical’ level of the narrative dealing with
the past before and during the war and has “the format of the intelligence
dossier” (Halio 1983: 624). The narrator changes in the course of the novel
because of his love for Susi (who first seems to be a mysterious daughter,
ward or mistress of Helmuth von Rummelsberg) and the knowledge that
the historical research gives him (Susi’s father is a wanted war criminal).
The Rummelsbers, a decent, if naïve, Pomeranian family, got into the clutches of history with one of the brothers becoming a Nazi, the second, indifferent and apolitical hedonist, trying in a cunning way to steer away from
the openly ideological position of his countrymen, and the youngest,
Edward, a soldier who had defected to the Russian army and remained a
Communist idealist, living now in East Berlin. The possible message of the
narrator seems to suggest that even the story of one family is not simple in
moral terms. It demonstrates the well-known truth (earlier shown in Game
in Heaven) that evil is often connected to the best intentions of human
beings — e.g., patriotic attempts to save a country by adopting such ideology as Nazism, or to save Europe by adopting communism. On the personal
level it can take the form of saving oneself or one’s family by cheating and
doing things that should not be done, such as help the former SS sadistic
murderer (Strepper — Susi’s father) escape punishment. The suggestion
that can be made is that, perhaps, from a historical perspective, the mod20th
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ern world is not much better than the world of the Nazis, and war crimes
against civilians on both sides bring acute suffering no matter who started it
all. On the other hand, the narrator is not entirely reliable: in spite of his
belief in British superior honesty and fair-mindedness, he cheats his authorities and hides a part of the truth about the Rummelsbergs, thus helping to
save Susi and her relatives. Is the narrator, then, converted to the side of the
Junkers who cared more about family and friends than about Hitler’s global plans? Or is he still deeply bothered by the presence of his father-in-law,
a figure of evil he got to know from the Rummelsberg dossier, at his wedding? The ending of the novel is ambiguous on this point: the young couple
on the way to their honeymoon place talk about Strepper and the briefness
of Susis’s comments and apparent indifference of the narrator leave a question mark at the end of this study of the ex-Nazi world, leave “the readers —
if not Read — in a position of doubt” (Halio 1983: 630) about how to treat
the past that is still so closely bound to the present and to family loyalties:
“When we were on the Olympiastrasse I said to her: ‘Who was the man
in the blue jacket, the one who couldn’t speak? Was he your father?’
‘Yes,’ she said after a short silence. Then, after another pause, she said: ‘I
wanted him to be there.…’
I tried, with my tongue, to get a piece of chicken out from between my
teeth.
‘I’d never seen him before,’ Susi said. ‘I didn’t think he looked very nice,
did you?’ She screwed up her nose and smiled at me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said and smiled too but kept my eyes on the road.”
(Read 1968: 314)
As in the case of Game in Heaven, it seems that the narrative technique in The Junkers allowed Read to pose a number of disturbing questions that would not have been possible to raise in the 1960s without the
serious risk of committing oneself to a definite political and ethical option.
The third novel, which deals with the subject of Catholicism before
and after Vatican II, is the story of Edward Dawson, a Catholic boy educated in a Benedictine school, a great idealist who wants to serve other human
beings and who becomes victim of the secularization of the Church’s concerns after Vatican II. The story is told by his school friend, an agnostic, who
168
reconstructs Dawson’s life on the basis of what the latter as well as other of
his friends and acquaintances have told him. Like in the previous novels,
the motif of disillusionment and frustration of one’s highest hopes plays a
very important part. The fact that the narrator is an agnostic makes it possible for a lot of criticism of the Catholic Church to be included in the book
and given to the reader, so that they can decide whether the charges are
justified. Irony plays again a crucial role and is, this time, revealed through
the structure of the story, particularly towards the end of the novel. Dawson,
aspiring to great things and desiring to be a saint, sins through a lack of charity: he who wanted to help other human beings, causes the death of his
wife who, unloved and neglected, commits suicide.
The narrator does not comment on this event, he simply relates what
has happened, but does not seem to understand the woman’s motives. He
is also — like Dawson’s other friends — puzzled by Edward’s decision to go
back to what the latter had seen in his youth as his vocation. There is no
clear explanation given, but apparently it is the suffering Dawson experiences after his unlucky attempt at a relationship with the woman he loves
(Jenny) and the pain and guilt he feels after the death of his wife that bring
him back to religious life and to the same Trappist monastery in which he
has before lost his faith. His friends, the narrator among them, are confused,
angered and doubtful whether Dawson has done the right thing and is
happy now that he understands — as he tells his agnostic friend - the confusion the modern world experiences between social and religious morality, “between the exigencies of human life and the deference due to God”
(Read 1980: 181). Again, like in the previous novels, the narrator, knowledgeable about facts but ignorant about motives and feelings which he
does not share, opens up possibilities of reflection on the life of the title
hero and saves the novel from easy didacticism. The final conversation
between the narrator and Jenny, on their way back from the Trappist
monastery, is again cryptic and ambiguous, although Jenny — in search of
great ideas, always in her case somehow mixed up with sex, wants to be
assured about Dawson’s emotional and intellectual position:
“She [Jenny] sat back and was quiet for a few more minutes: then she
leaned forward again.
‘What do you think, though?’
‘How do you mean?’
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
‘Was he mad or sane?’
‘He wasn’t mad. Not at all.’
‘But broken?’
‘I don’t know. It depends.’
‘On what?’
‘I don’t know… on whether you believe in God or not.’
‘Then he was sick..’
[Jenny] ‘You said…you said it was the school that buggered him up.’
…
‘I suppose so. But now he seemed…I don’t know…so much at ease with
himself.’”
(183-4)
Summing up the above discussion on Read’s early novels, it should be
repeated that the narrative technique used in them helped, in an ingenious
way, to introduce the most topical themes of the 1960s avoiding any clear
didacticism and providing the author with a comfortable distance from
which he could practice his satirical approach to modern reality. However,
as is usually the case with Read’s fiction, which is never openly moralistic,
the political and social issues in the three novels still have a metaphysical
dimension, which, paradoxically, is both concealed and enhanced by his
narrative technique.
References
Baldwick, C. 1990. A Concise Oxford Dictonary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Halio, J. L. (ed.). 1983. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 14. Detroit: Gale
Research Company.
Read, P. P. 1966. Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson.
Read, P. P. 1968. The Junkers. London: The Alison Press/Martin Secker and Warburg.
Read, P. P. 1980 (1969) Monk Dawson. New York: Avon Books.
Read, P. P. 2006. Hell and Other Destinations: A Novelist’s Reflections on this World
and the Next. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
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Riley, Carolyn (ed.). 1975. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale
Research Company.
Rowland, S. 1999. “Piers Paul Read on the Future of the Church”. Interview published in AD2000, Vol. 12, No.10, p. 8.
Woodman, T. M. 1991. Faithful Fictions: The Catholic Novel in British Literature.
Philadelphia: Open University Press.
WHAT IS “ALMOST TRUE”: LARKIN AND KEATS
ISTVÁN D. RÁCZ
University of Debrecen
Abstract: The paper offers a parallel reading of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian
Urn” and Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb”. The close reading of some relevant
sections of Keats’s poem (particularly the last two lines) tries to show that the
poems mutually read each other and, moreover, they offer a better
understanding of the two poet.
One of Philip Larkin’s most often quoted texts is his famous and infamous “Statement” confirming his disbelief “in ‘tradition’ or a common
myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets” (1971: 79).
This is a manifesto of his anti-modernism, which provoked Charles
Tomlinson’s well-known neo-modernist attack in “The Middlebrow Muse”
accusing Larkin of “intense parochialism” (1957: 214). One should notice,
however, that Larkin used the word “tradition”in inverted commas. This
suggests that it was not tradition in general that he rejected; breaking with
tradition would have conflicted with his conservatism. What he rejected is
Eliot’s traditionalism, his programme of self-sacrifice and his principle of
intertextuality.
But even intertextuality is much more important in Larkin’s poetry than
he would ever have admitted. Many of his poems can be read as palimpsests, re-writings of other poems. To mention a few examples: “Coming”
echoes Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush”, “Days” is a parody of Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s poem with the same title, and “Dockery and Son” is a radical re-thinking of Dickens (deconstructing both the imagery and the ideology of Dombey and Son). In this paper I will attempt to discuss how John
Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1974: 191-192) and some poems by Larkin,
particularly “An Arundel Tomb“ (1988: 110-111) read each other.
Romanticism is a key word if one wishes to interpret Larkin’s life work
as an organic whole: the ambivalent attitude that he showed to romantic
writers and texts is the source of a tension which proved to be extremely
fruitful and led to some of his best poems. One basic question implied in
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Larkin’s poetry is this: which are those values that the poems should preserve? Does experience mean the reality we perceive or another reality
behind it? Larkin’s attitude to transcendence creates a philosophical dimension in his poetry (which, ironically, is often seen as anti-intellectual).
Whether a world of transcendence exists or not is a fundamental but never
answered question in his verse. Significantly, Seamus Heaney has written:
...while Larkin is exemplary in the way he sifts the conditions of contemporary life, refuses alibis and pushes consciousness towards an exposed
condition that is neither cynicism nor despair, there survives in him a
repining for a more crystalline reality to which he might give allegiance
(qtd. in Regan 1997:24).
This “on the one hand ... on the other hand” pattern is very frequent in
Larkin criticism, and the controversy it implies can well be seen at least at
three levels. What Heaney has referred to is the ontological level: the duality of materialism and transcendentalism. At an aesthetic level the same
duality is manifest in the antagonism between a romantic and an antiromantic Movement poet. Finally, if one considers Larkin’s work as a part of
literary history, the emphasis will be on the rivalry between Yeats’s and
Hardy’s voices. Larkin never ceased to search for answers to the fundamental questions of human existence, but in this quest he polarized his view of
the world and created binary oppositions.
Although these controversies are inseparable from each other, in this
paper I will focus on the second of these: the ambivalence of Larkin’s attitude to the romantics in general and Keats in particular. Larkin’s life work
can be read as a twentieth-century re-writing of Keats. His repeated supercilious remarks make the link between the two poets even more interesting, and possible parallel readings more meaningful. In 1945, still at the
beginning of his career, he wrote to Kingsley Amis: “...it never does to write
things you think are true. Only things you think are beautiful. Keets [sic] was
a silly Bum” (Larkin 1992: 108). The overacted exasperation and the misspelling of the name reveals that the young poet is having a quarrel with a
father figure. He is trying to fight against his dominance, but he will feel his
overwhelming presence and authority all his life. He certainly did feel it
when writing “An Arundel Tomb“.
*
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Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is one of the most widely anthologized
poems in British literature. As Helen Vendler has pointed out, the preposition on (instead of the to that he uses in four other odes) implies the idea
“that art tells us a story” (qtd. in Motion 1997: 389). This is further developed
in the first line: the phrase “still unravished bride” suggests that the bride
will be ravished, but there is no story in which it could actually happen. (In
Earl Wasserman’s words: what we see on the urn is “a ravishing that can
never become ravishment” [1964: 17].) If there is any story represented by
the urn, it is hidden from the speaker. Neither the girl, nor the boy speaks to
him: they are a “bride of quietness” and a “foster-child of Silence”. As a
result, all the implied poet knows is a series of questions.
These are not answered in stanza two; instead, the speaker celebrates
“unheard” melodies. (One is tempted to say that the privative modifier both
in this word and in unravished is very Larkinesque; he is famous for his
words with negative prefixes, such as unignorable, unarmorial, or the innovative word unspent). This lack of a story (which could be signified by the
temporality of a heard melody) dominates the whole stanza. The vocabulary of these lines is predominated by words such as not (used five times,
including the word cannot), no, nor and never (repeated in line 7). The gap
between the girl and the boy makes it impossible for any story to progress;
likewise, the gap between the musician and the listener makes music
impossible. As Larkin wrote in “I Remember, I Remember”: “Nothing, like
something, happens anywhere.” The lack of an experience is the most perfect experience, and it forms the basis of ideal poetry.
The story that can never be told haunts the whole poem. In stanza four,
after describing an ancient Greek town, the speaker concludes:
And, little town, thy street for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
(Keats 1974:191)
What does the speaker celebrate in the famous closure of the poem?
Is it the story that can never be told? Can one interpret it as the beauty and
truth of atemporality? “Such absences!” — as Larkin exclaims in a poem.
Larkin’s absences read Keats’s. The ecstasy of some parts of the poem and
the unsurpassable pleasure felt at viewing a Greek masterpiece are contrasted with the ambiguity of the closure. What is all we “need to know”?
Does this refer to the main clause of the previous sentence (the statement
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that the urn is eternal) or to the quotation (“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”)?
What we need to know is either that art will survive us, or that ethics and
aesthetics are mutually dependent upon each other. In both cases, the reader of this poem can ask: if this is all we need to know, are we excluded from
other forms of knowledge? Should we let ourselves be deceived by this
aphorism and this way make our lives bearable? Or does the closure mean
that there is no further truth? Not surprisingly, Keats’s ode has a formidable
amount of comments, often contradictory. This follows from the abovementioned ambiguity; each reader is invited to construct her/his own reading.
Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb” can be read as a re-writing of the “Ode on
a Grecian Urn”. The similarities between the two poems are striking. Both
poems are based on the description of an object that contains dead bodies,
but represents life on the outside: Keats constructed an image of an ideally
beautiful vessel, whose function is to contain human ashes. (The first OED
meaning of the noun urn is this: “An earthenware or metal vessel or vase of
a rounded or ovaloid form and with a circular base, used by various peoples
esp. in former times (notably by the Romans and Greeks) to preserve the
ashes of the dead. Hence vaguely used [esp. poet.] for ‘a tomb or sepulcher,
the grave’.”) Larkin created a vision of a tomb in Chichester cathedral. On
the Greek urn the speaker perceives the vitality of life; more precisely, the
implied poet constructs it within the text. I fully agree with Andrew Motion’s
suggestion that the urn is Keats’s “own invention” whether he had a particular urn in mind or not (1997: 91). On the tomb represented in Larkin’s text
the two figures are static and de-faced, but the touch of the two hands indicates life.
The urn and the tomb signify not only the past itself, but also the tension between the past and the present. In Keats this is suggested by the multitude of questions: as they all remain unanswered, no continuity is established between the life in the pictures and the act of perception in the present. We are excluded from the knowledge of the past, since history is discontinuous. Although many readers would see a completely different
meaning in Keats’s poem, Larkin’s text gives evidence that the reading I
have just outlined is possible.
In Larkin the time of history becomes a void: the two effigies are
shown “in the hollow of / An unarmorial age” (stanza 6, lines 2-3). This
image also establishes a link with the penultimate poem of The Whitsun
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Weddings, “Afternoons”: “In the hollows of afternoons / Young mothers
assemble” (Larkin 1988: 121). (“An Arundel Tomb”, it will be remembered,
is the last poem of this volume.) Not unlike in Keats’s ode, in Larkin’s poem
mortality is contrasted with the apparently eternal vision of a man and a
woman: the earl and the countess. They “lie in stone” (stanza 1, line 2), and
have become signifiers in the semantics of an age different from that of their
lifetime. Having lost their identities, now they are objects used by subjects
in the present: the visitors of the church and the poet implied in the poem.
The unasked question hidden in the text is: what will remain of the two
hands gently holding each other? To put the question in Keats’s terms (since
Keats also reads Larkin): does an “unheard melody” still have significance
for the twentieth-century poet?
Larkin, however, does not ask any question overtly. Instead, he confirms the difference between the intention of the two long-dead people (the
meaning they attributed to themselves) and the way we gaze at them today
(the meaning we construct and impose on them): “They would not think to
lie so long” (stanza 3, line 1), “They would not guess...” (stanza 4, line 1),
“They hardly meant...” (stanza 7, line 3). The visitors of the tomb are shown
in the context of natural processes. The slow devastation by snow, sunshine
and birds is followed (and intensified) by an endless line of people
“Washing at their identity” (stanza 6, line 1). As James Booth has pointed
out, this is an echo of Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain” (1992:43). The
metaphor recalls the small but steady destruction of a coast by the sea (like
the image of a coastal shelf in “This Be The Verse”), and is followed by the
vision of time as a void:
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
(Larkin 1988: 110, stanza 6, lines 2-6)
This colon at the end of the penultimate stanza calls the reader’s attention to the last lines, which function as a closure not only to this poem but
the whole volume. The implied poet seems to be taking a deep breath
before attempting to find an answer to the question mentioned above: what
has been preserved of the two hands touching each other?
176
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
(stanza 7)
The signification of the two figures has been changed by time, which
was represented earlier both as a void and as a devastating power in nature.
The result of their transformation is “untruth”, a condition that was anticipated by the punning use of the verb lie in stanzas 1 and 3. But “untruth” is
not exactly the same as a lie: the prefix, by modifying the word “truth”, suggests that truth was originally there. In other words: truth has been lost in
the void of time.
The next sentence presents what this “untruth” is: “The stone fidelity /
They hardly meant has come to be / Their final blazon...” The effigies are
used to signify fidelity; this is the meaning of the sign they have become.
Andrew Motion tells us how Larkin found the relevant word: it was his partner, Monica Jones, who “provided the word ‘blazon’ for ‘An Arundel Tomb’
when he called out to her that he needed ‘something meaning a sign, two
syllables’ (1993: 275). This sounds, almost unpleasantly, like Larkin doing
his crossword. It still deserves attention that he wanted a word “meaning a
sign”, and surely he would not have used it in the final version if it had not
been the word he needed. The primary meaning of blazon in present-day
English is ‘coat of arms’. It is a French word, therefore it distances the dead
bodies from their own Englishness the same way as the Latin words do in
stanza 3, but also finds a place for them in European cultural heritage. Julia
Kristeva has enlarged on the historical significance of this word in her fundamental study on intertextuality, “The Bounded Text” (1980: 3, emphasis in
the original):
...laudatory utterances, known as blazons, were abundant in France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They come from a communicative discourse, shouted in public squares, and designed to give direct information to the crowd on wars (the number of soldiers, their direction,
armaments, etc.), or on the marketplace (the quality and price of merchandise). These solemn, tumultuous, or monumental enumerations
belong to a culture that might be called phonetic. [...] The blazon lost its
univocity and became ambiguous; praise and blame at the same time. In
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the fifteenth century, the blazon was already the nondisjunctive figure par
excellence.
The touch of the two hands has become an icon in heraldry, but also
something that has been preserved “from oblivion” (to use Larkin’s phrase)
and a “nondisjunctive figure” (to use Kristeva’s). The countess and the earl
have become signs. What happens in “An Arundel Tomb” is the opposite of
prosopopeia as described by Paul de Man in his essay on autobiography
(1984: 76): instead of evoking the two dead people (and reconstructing
them by using the trope of personification) the visitors of the grave (including the persona speaking in the poem) symbolically close the dead into
their own effigies. The dead are not allowed to speak; posterity will speak
for them.
The final aphorism both in Keats and in Larkin is presented as a fictitious quotation. Keats introduces the direct quotation with the phrase “thou
say’st”. Larkin is more enigmatic, but it is clear that the last line is a subordinate clause. In John Bayley’s reading (1984: 4): “‘What remains of us is
love’ in the sense that love equates with self-extinction”. But in the penultimate line Larkin says that it is “almost true”, that is not true. We should not
believe what the urn said to Keats’s admiring spectator (or what the spectator thought the urn said).
Almost is a centrally important word in Larkin’s vocabulary. A later
poem, “The Trees” (1988: 166), starts with these lines:
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The function of almost is the same here as in the closure of “An
Arundel Tomb”: on the one hand, it means that the trees say nothing; on the
other hand, it suggests that the implied poet wants them to speak.
Consequently, this word reveals a romantic poet, who has a strong desire to
find meaning in an archetypal image, but also an agnostic poet, who has
given up the hope that any meaning can be found in it. The trees are like
Prufrock’s mermaids: they will not speak to him (Eliot 1946: 15). The same
applies to cultural icons representing death: an urn or a tombstone. Death
is not only the ontological end of human life, but also an epistemological
end. Burial places are silent.
This silence in Larkin’s poem is the quietness of two effigies representing both life (through the touch of the hands) and death (through lying, in
178
both senses of the word). In Jim Crace’s novel Being Dead the same dual
symbolism is constructed in the image of the dead bodies of a man and a
woman, husband and wife, brutally murdered on a sea coast:
Joseph’s grasp on Celice’s leg had weakened as he’d died. But still his
hand was touching her, the grainy pastels of her skin, one fingertip among
her baby ankle hairs. Their bodies had expired, but anyone could tell —
just look at them — that Joseph and Celice were still devoted. For while
his hand was touching her, curved round her shin, the couple seemed to
have achieved that peace the world denies, a period of grace, defying
even murder. Anyone who found them there, so wickedly disfigured,
would nevertheless be bound to see that something of their love had survived the death of cells. The corpses were still a man and wife, quietly resting flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet (2000:12).
Although Crace was not conscious of any influence when writing this
part of the novel (as he told me in conversation, he realized the similarity
only after completing the text [7 May 2002]), this image is still a reading of
“An Arundel Tomb”, in which the effigies are transformed into dead bodies:
two people who have become statues of themselves. This is one meaning
of “being dead”. Another is that the bodies are exposed to the gaze of the
living. Like Keats and Larkin, Crace also constructs a situation in the text in
which the banal idea of love surviving bodies becomes an indirect quotation: “Anyone who found them [...] would nevertheless be bound to see that
something of their love has survived the death of cells” (2000:12). The
example of these three texts shows how a cliché is constantly re-written in
literature.
Anyone could argue that the last sentence of Larkin’s poem is still
there, and it will surely linger on in the reader’s memory. (Not unlike Keats’s
and Crace’s sentences about transcendental survival.) The closure of the
poem (also the last line of The Whitsun Weddings) is highly ambivalent.
Larkin is fully aware that we are all deceived if we believe the attractive
banality of this line, but he also knows that we are tempted to believe it.
(John Carey, 2000: 63, has identified these two conflicting attitudes as the
male voice of scepticism and the female voice of belief.) We remain “less
deceived” in this interim position between a desire for eternal love and the
consciousness of mortality.
If there are two voices in Larkin’s verse (a female and a male, a
Yeatsean and a Hardiesque, a romantic and an anti-modernist, etc.), this
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also means that there was an ever-present longing in him to find transcendence. He never found this realm, as he refused to be deceived. He faced
his own alienation and the limits of human existence. Following in Keats’s
wake in “An Arundel Tomb” he created a “universe” in which beauty is
almost true.
References
Bayley, J. 1984. Selected Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Booth, J. 1992. Philip Larkin: Writer. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Carey, J. 2000. “The Two Philip Larkins”, in J. Booth (ed.). New Larkins for Old.
Houndmills: Macmillan, pp. 51-65.
Crace, J. 2000. Being Dead. London: Penguin.
De Man, P. 1984. “Autobiography as De-Facement”, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism.
New York: Columbia UP, pp. 67-81.
Eliot, T.S. 1946. Collected Poems 1909-1935. London: Faber.
Keats, J. 1974. Poems. Everyman’s Library series. London: Dent.
Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language. New York: Columbia University Press.
Larkin, P. 1971. Required Writing. London: Faber.
Larkin, P. 1988. Collected Poems. London: Faber.
Larkin, P. 1992. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin. Edited by Anthony Thwaite. London:
Faber.
Motion, A. 1993. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. London: Faber.
Motion, A. 1997. Keats. London: Faber.
Regan, S. (ed.) 1997. Philip Larkin. New Casebooks series. Houndmills: Macmillan.
Tomlinson, C. 1957. “The Middlebrow Muse”, in Essays in Criticism 7, pp. 208-217.
Wasserman, E. 1964. “The Ode on a Grecian Urn”, in: Keats. Twentieth Century
Views series. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, pp. 113-141.
INTENSITIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS DELUSION, DREAM, AND
DELIRIUM IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MRS. DALLOWAY AND
KATHERINE ANN PORTER’S “PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER”
CLAIRE CRABTREE-SINNETT
University of Detroit Mercy
Abstract: Parallels between Woolf’s novel and Porter’s novella include the
Great War as both background and foreground, the intensely reflective woman
character, a critique of patriarchy, and experimentation with language. Both
works explore intensities of consciousness, in which a continuum from dream
to delirium to delusion suggests an effacing of boundaries, including that
between sanity and madness.
The chiming of Big Ben which punctuates and permeates the hours of
Clarissa Dalloway’s day, “first a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable” celebrates, in part, the recovery of Londoners from the Great War
(Woolf 1925: 4). Its following sound, the ringing of the bells of St. Margaret’s,
as conceived by Clarissa’s old suitor Peter Walsh, “glides into the heart and
buries itself in ring after ring of sound, like something alive which wants to
confide itself, to disperse itself, to be, with a tremor of delight, at rest – like
Clarissa herself’ (1925: 50). The bells embody for Peter a moment of closeness with Clarissa in their youth. But if Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway
is in part a celebration of life and recovery, it is as well a conversation with
death. Thus, for Peter the “languish [ing]” of the bells brings a sense that
“the sound expressed languor and suffering” and finally, recalling that
Clarissa has been ill and has a weakened heart, “the final stroke tolled for
death in the midst of life” (1925: 50). Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse,
Pale Rider” might well serve as a companion piece for Mrs. Dalloway, even
to the detail of Miranda, a newspaper writer in a mountain town in the
United States, waking to the “gong” of war at the start of the story.
Mrs. Dalloway and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” have in common an exploration of intensities of consciousness, including a continuum of delusions,
dreams, and moments of integrative, euphoric vision, which in Woolf’s
work have been much discussed. Both works contain the seeds of a cri-
182
tique of patriarchy and a condemnation of the kind of masculinist quasilogic which would legitimate, even privilege, the horrors of war. A soldier is
offered in each – explicitly by Porter – as an innocent “sacrificial lamb.”
Embedded in both works are attempts to critique and even bridge the binary oppositions evident when war and peace, male and female identities,
logic and feeling, sanity and madness, language and the unspeakable are
thrown into relief by the circumstances of the Great War. The attempt to
force language past its logical limits, a key phenomenon of High
Modernism, represents in these works, then, an attempt to create,
ephemeral as it may be, what we might now call a sort of “third term”
which offers an alternative to the limitations of subject and object.
To suggest how these women writers attempted to efface these binaries is of course to participate in these cultural assumptions to some extent,
and thus to implicate one’s own thinking. Yet not only the innovative, nonhierarchical and unifying vision expressed in both works, but also the exploration of a fluid, perhaps fragmented self and the suggestions of androgyny
in the works serve to interrogate then-current notions of patriarchy, sanity,
heterosexuality, and logic, as if to point up the inadequacy of established
binary thinking from within the restrictions they impose. Perhaps most interestingly, the intense, unifying vision as expressed in Septimus’ delusions,
Miranda’s delirium and near-death experience, and both Miranda’s and
Clarissa’s ultimately coherent identities insist upon a continuum in such
areas as logic, sanity, sexual identity, and power, rather than culturally designated polarities.
As Mrs. Dalloway begins, the war is, of course, over; emblematic of
this relief and recovery is the excitement that unites people in the street as
Clarissa walks through London to buy flowers for her party – first all attention turned toward a royal car moving through the street, but superseding
this, a small plane spiraling above the heads of passersby, skywriting a message which everyone tries to decipher – and which turns out to be an advertisement for toffee. If the toffee is both trivial and pleasurable, it may be a
fitting emblem for everyday renewal after war. But Woolf describes as well
a sort of transcendence in her distinctive descriptions of the connectedness
of everyone. The playfully swooping plane creates a shared silence, as “All
down the Mall people were standing and looking up into the sky. As they
looked the whole world became perfectly silent, and a flight of gulls crossed
the sky... and in this extraordinary silence and peace, in this pallor, in this
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purity, bells struck eleven times...” (1925: 21). In descriptions such as these,
Woolf attempts – as Porter will in Miranda’s delirium – to force language to
get at meanings which defy and expand ordinary logic.
While critics like Kathryn Stelmach, for example, discuss Woolf’s writing in terms of the rhetorical device of ekphrasis (2006: 304-326), and others cite Joyce’s “epiphanies” or elements of mysticism in Woolf’s prose
(Kane1995: 328-349), or comment upon the interplay of Kristeva’s “semiotic” and “symbolic” in sections of Woolf’s novels (Garvey 1991: 60), this
essay skirts these detailed but potentially reductive analyses in favor of a
respectful distance from Woolf’s linguistic and semantic intricacies, and
attempts to point up as well the parallels evident between Mrs. Dalloway
and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” Interestingly, in his “Afterword” to the 1962
edition of the title story of the collection, Mark Schorer avers that “Pale
Horse, Pale Rider,” is “so subtle and complex” that he is “unwilling to try to
take it apart in any detail,” that it is “really about the birth of an artist, the one
who has suffered everything, including death, and comes back from it, disabused, all-knowing, or knowing at least all there is to know” (1962: 175).
Many observant readers of Woolf might concur with Woolf biographer
Phyllis Rose that “there is no way fully to explain or analyze the lift of spirit
that occurs when one reads certain parts of Mrs. Dalloway” (1978: 128).
Earlier on the walk that opens Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa has, in fact, contemplated dying and felt the conviction, despite her avowed atheism, that
she would live on, that people like her and Peter would “live in each other,”
in “the trees at home,” and that she herself will be “laid out like a mist
between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she
had seen the trees lift the mist....” (1925: 9). But if Clarissa espouses an affirmative, even transcendent view of death, the character of Septimus Smith,
the shell-shocked soldier whose suicide will be revealed at her party, seems
to confirm Peter’s notion after hearing the bells, that death inescapably permeates life. As Clarissa thinks about her life, she sees that, although she
feels “very young,” and that her mind “sliced like a knife through everything” she also feels “unspeakably aged” and outside of life, “out, out, far
out to sea and alone” (1925: 8). Despite her vitality and her sense of a shared
love of life, a connection between people of all classes on the street, a
Modernist sense of a sort of redemptive act of artistic clarity, Clarissa
“always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one
day” (1925: 8). Thus Woolf links Clarissa and Septimus in the first pages of
184
the novel, establishing the self-educated, would-be poet as a sort of alter
ego to Clarissa, both an opposite and kindred spirit. Septimus, haunted by
the death of his officer, Evans, for whom he may have eroticized feelings,
and suffering from delusions, has the thought as he stands on the sidewalk
while the royal car passes, that he is the cause of a traffic jam, and further,
that “the world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames”
(1925: 15). Yet, since he has lived through just such conflagrations,
Septimus’ perception is not entirely illogical; the time and place are wrong,
but the event can be said to be real. The “unspeakable” experience of sacrificial males like Septimus in wartime, Woolf here links to Clarissa’s
redemptive vision of the inexpressible. This near-meeting of Clarissa and
Septimus sets the stage for a novel in which, according to Woolf s original
plan, Clarissa herself was to commit suicide. Interestingly, Katherine Anne
Porter’s Miranda will meet a kind of alter ego in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” not
her soldier Adam, but a bitter hospitalized soldier who reflects her own
state of mind.
If in Mrs. Dalloway Woolf establishes an atmosphere of sometime
euphoria, memory, and connection punctuated by reminders of the immanence of death, Porter offers only a circumscribed time and space for
Miranda and her lover Adam in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” within a general
atmosphere of war and pestilence. Miranda’s sense of the war is of it not
just permeating, but poisoning everything; as surely as Clarissa Dalloway’s
day of preparations for her party is divided by the tolling of London’s bells,
the young reporter Miranda’s time with her soldier Adam is punctuated by
her awareness of funerals passing in the street, funerals for deaths caused
not by battle wounds but by influenza.
As the novella opens and Miranda, presumably already ill with influenza, dreams of selecting a horse for a race with death, she catalogues her
losses: “Where is that lank greenish stranger I remember hanging about the
place, welcomed by my grandfather, my great-aunt, my five times removed
cousin, my decrepit hound and my silver kitten?” In a house where they are
“all tangled together like badly cast fishing lines,” the dreaming Miranda
asks, “What else besides them did I have in the world? Nothing. Nothing is
mine, I have only nothing but it is enough, it is beautiful and it is all mine”
(Porter 1937: 114). As a young woman of twenty-four who in an earlier
Miranda story had escaped from a Catholic boarding school through a brief
marriage, the young writer wryly questions her identity as a coherent self:
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“Do I even walk around in my own skin or is it something I have borrowed
to spare my modesty?” (1962: 114). Porter’s interest in the notion of the permanence or fluidity of the self, even before she slips into delirium, seems to
parallel Woolf s examination of this idea both in her essays and in novels
such as Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves.
In her dream, Miranda outraces death who “regarded her without
meaning, the black stare of mindless malice.” She rises in her stirrups and
shouts, “I am not going with you this time – ride on!” With this evidence of
self-assertive, coherent self, she awakens. It is here that the “gong” of war
sounds in her mind, as “slowly, unwittingly, Miranda drew herself up ... from
the pit of sleep, waited in a daze for life to begin again. A single word struck
in her mind, a gong of warning, reminding her for the daylong what she forgot happily in sleep, but only in sleep. The war, said the gong” (1962: 115).
Porter joins then, from the vantage point of a writer in the mid-thirties,
in Woolf s Modernist project of making language both express and fail to
express nuances of human experience, letting an undefined sound resonate in readers’ minds in a way not entirely dissimilar to Woolf s descriptions of the bells of London, whose effect on people can not be reduced to
words. If the “gong,” the “pale rider,” Miranda’s near-death perception of
unity and restoration of lost friends, the bells and the sky and trees above
Clarissa’s London function as symbols, they are symbols for complexes of
thought and emotion which cannot be thoroughly, logically, defined.
Johanna Garvey’s assertion in a 1991 article about Woolf may be applied to
Porter as well, that she uses a “narrative strategy that refuses to dominate,
conquer, and contain” (1991:60), in effect subverting hierarchies and binaries
What Woolf, and Porter as well, are attempting, however, defies categorization; minute analysis may have a reductive effect. In a delirious or a
delusional state, language attempts to describe the intuitive, illogical, or
spiritual insight that the logic of literary criticism itself, or the quasi-logic of
the war machine or of modern medicine, as Woolf felt, does not acknowledge. Woolf s defiance of linear logic also defies what the villain of Mrs.
Dalloway, Sir William Bradshaw, the doctor who would incarcerate
Septimus, will call a “sense of proportion.”
The various shapes into which the war has formed an intrusion into
Miranda’s mind become clear in her memories of the day before. Two men
had greeted her at her office, enforcers for the War Bond Committee, bul-
186
lies who quote jingoistic rhetoric and tell her she is the only person in her
office who hasn’t bought a $50 war bond, a bond she cannot afford.
Their lie is revealed almost immediately when Miranda finds her colleague “Townie,” sobbing in the cloakroom, having been similarly intimidated. She will hear the rhetoric of war propaganda repeated later at a performance she attends for her work. Since she has been “demoted” to the
theater and society pages for failing to reveal a juicy scandal about a disgraced young girl in an article, she no longer is permitted to write news stories. She must mingle with well-off young women who attend dances for
the soldiers but earn Miranda’s scorn for their disdain for the enlisted men,
and an odious task of the day is Miranda’s joining in bringing gift baskets to
hospitalized men. Paralleling Clarissa’s near-meeting of Septimus on the
London streets, Miranda has a fleeting vision of a sort of double for herself,
a bitter soldier upon whose bed she sets down her basket and flowers,
embarrassed at “the idiocy of her errand” of joining in trying to cheer up the
soldiers:
He was lying with his eyes closed, his eyebrows in a sad bitter frown.... It
was like turning a corner absorbed in your own painful thoughts and meeting your state of mind embodied, face to face, my own feelings about this
whole thing, made flesh....Of course I would pick him out.... (1962: 122).
Porter’s Miranda rails against the bullying and propaganda in the
United States, citing not only the inflated rhetoric that describes “those vile
Huns,” the “Boche,” bayoneting babies – an image that will occur in
Miranda’s delirium when she is at her most gravely ill – but she also
describes the “guarded resentment” and defensive attitude of men who
cannot fight, like her fellow reporter Chuck, with his bad lungs (1962: 136).
And she sees housewives collecting peach pits, thought to contain useful
materials for explosives, as hoodwinked by the designers of the war effort:
It keeps them busy and makes them feel useful, and all these women running wild with the men away are dangerous, if they aren’t given something
to keep their little minds out of mischief... Keeping still and quiet will win
the war (1962:136).
Porter unearths a neat irony in the pacification of potentially “wild”
women by having them collect peach pits which will in turn become to
explosives. Adam, the innocent soldier about to be shipped out, signed up
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
as a sapper instead of a flier to placate his mother, who was unaware that
the work of handling explosives is far more dangerous than flying.
Adam and Miranda, who have met ten days earlier, both recognize that
Adam will die in the war. Adam, who is thought to be a somewhat idealized
depiction of the young soldier Porter fell in love with in 1918, who nursed
her through influenza but died himself, is called by Mark Shorer “the beautiful original innocent” (1962: 175). Miranda describes him in his officer’s
uniform as looking “like a fine healthy apple” (1962: 125); Adam nonetheless shares her sense of irony about the war. The two joke about smoking,
with Adam saying, “‘Does it matter so much if you’re going to war anyway?’“
and Miranda retorts, “‘No...and it matters even less if you’re staying at home
knitting socks”‘ (1962: 125). Adam says “matter-of-factly” that, “‘If I didn’t
go... I couldn’t look myself in the face” (1962:141). Rather than logically sorting out the reasoning behind the war, Adam seems drawn to it by a destiny
that he knows will end with his death. Miranda thinks, “it was not good even
imagining [a future with Adam}, because he was not for her or for any
woman, being beyond experience, committed without any knowledge or
act of his own to death” (1962: 129). Adam, with good health, his engineering training, and his love of cars and boats, is the quintessence of goodhearted manliness. Yet his choice is not free, but rather pre-determined by
the social structures that shape and define masculinity. Miranda thinks of
him as “pure, all the way through, flawless, complete, as the sacrificial lamb
must be” (1962:141).
Adam’s unreflective masculinity, then, suggests the cultural assumptions that justify male sacrifice; Porter exposes the false logic, not just of the
bullying or propaganda, but also of gender-inflected definitions of cowardice and heroism. In England, for example, the large numbers of emotionally damaged men returning from the horrors of trench warfare, so well
depicted in Pat Barker’s contemporary novel Regeneration, as well as by
Woolf, initially provoked proposals that they should be shot for cowardice.
However, with over 80,000 incapacitated soldiers, rhetoric in military and
medical circles developed to replace the term “hysteria,” associated with
women, with the more manly term “shell shock” (Childs 2000: 164).
Woolf’s views on the war are well known, but in Mrs. Dalloway, the
destructive patriarchal structures she describes are not so much those of
the government or the military – men like Richard Dalloway and even Peter
Walsh, who has been an administrator in India, unquestionably (and per-
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haps unquestioningly) attempt to do good. When Peter sees a group of
young soldiers marching to place a wreath on a monument, he sees in their
uniformity that “Life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under
a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring
corpse by discipline” (1925: 51). Yet, Peter thinks, “One had to respect it;
one might laugh; yet one had to respect it” (1925:51). In Mrs. Dalloway the
clearest evil lies in the medical profession and its essential arrogance, particularly in the person of Sir William Bradshaw, a more refined and powerful version of Porter’s War Bond enforcers. Rich, honored, and entirely certain of the rightness of his reasoning, he is intensely phallocratic and aligned
as well with the imperialist mission of Britain. For Sir William worships “proportion,” and,
worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made
England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized
despair, and made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until
they, too, shared his sense of proportion (1925: 99).
This bullying Woolf labels Proportion’s sister, “Conversion,” which
“feasts on the wills of the weakly” (1925: 100). Woolf, having suffered from
mental illness from a young age, has given Septimus some of her own delusory experiences, like hearing the birds sing in Greek.
Clarissa’s own characterization of Sir William, watching him at the
party, is excoriating. He was “a great doctor yet to her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but capable of some indescribable outrange – forcing your soul, that was it” (1925: 184). She imagines that,
“If this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had impressed him, like
that, with his power, might he [Septimus] not have said... they make life
intolerable, men like that?” (1925: 184-5).
Woolf returns to the notion of the indefinable nature of the self when
she has Clarissa compare her own experience with Septimus’ act of defiance, in these terms: “A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed
about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life....This he had preserved” (1925: 184). A motive for suicide, Clarissa muses, is found in “people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness “drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone” (1925:184).
Clarissa feels a kinship with Septimus; “She felt glad that he had done it;
thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the
air. He made her feel the beauty.” Woolf has Clarissa immediately drawn
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
back to life after this flirtation with suicide: “But she must go back. She must
assemble. She must find Sally and Peter” (1925: 186).
If Clarissa returns from connection to a suicide to a connection with
people she has cared for, and to her party, Miranda, disconnected from her
family and past, finds connection as well with those around her. She
records her habit of turning and looking back when leaving any friend,
regretting the “snapping of even the lightest bond” (1938: 129). Only Adam,
in her experience, when she looks back, is still following her with his eyes.
So does Woolf try to get at the sense of connection, not only in Clarissa’s
identification with Septimus or the early scenes in Bond Street and Regents’
Park, but also in the “thread” that the powerful, elderly, and androgynous
Lady Bruton imagines binding her to her luncheon guests, Hugh Whitbread
and Richard Dalloway. It is “as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body,
after lunching with them, by a thin thread” which would get thinner as they
walk away, becoming “hazy with sound of bells ... as a single spider’s thread
is blotted with raindrops, and burdened, sags down” (1925: 112). Richard
himself feels at the same moment an impulse of love for Clarissa, perceived
also as a spider’s thread that draws him to go home and tell Clarissa that he
loves her. “The time comes,” Richard thinks, “when it can’t be said; one’s
too shy to say it”; he thinks of the War and “thousands of poor chaps...shoveled together, already half forgotten,” and thinks of Clarissa and their life
together as “a miracle.” He brings Clarissa roses, and, unable to say he loves
her, sees that “she understood without his speaking: his Clarissa” (1925:
117).
Paralleling Clarissa’s understanding of Richard’s gift is the wordless
communication of Adam and Miranda. Dancing, they “said nothing but
smiled continually at each other, odd changing smiles as though they had
found a new language” (1962:142). But their most transcendent moments
are spent when Adam has recognized that Miranda is very ill, and has taken
on the androgynous nurturing role of nurse. He sits on her bed, and they
think of prayers, at first rather jokingly, establishing that she is Catholic and
he is Presbyterian. Their mutuality is celebrated when they find that they
both know a Negro spiritual, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” and they sing alternate verses: “‘ Pale horse, pale rider, done taken my lover away.’“ After
mammy, pappy, brother and sister have been taken, verse by verse, Miranda
sings the last, “‘Death, oh leave one singer to mourn’” (1962:150-1). That
190
mourner, as foreshadowed in her early dream, will not be the healthy
Adam, but the recovered Miranda.
In Miranda’s dream delirium, Adam is shot with arrows, a ship sprouts
wings, and the kind doctor Hildesheim becomes a German soldier bayoneting babies. She is aware of her mind tottering and her “reasoning coherent
self’ splitting off. Her very identity seems lost with “no multiple planes of living, tough filaments of memory and hope pulling taut backwards and forwards holding her up between them”(1962:151) Porter describes how “both
reason and desire fall away” from Miranda, but there remains “only a fiercely burning particle of being...a will to live” (158).
Miranda’s vision as she nears death is one of restoration and completeness, as well as a lack of a need for ego or identity:
[T]hrough he shimmering air came a great company of human beings,
and Miranda saw in an amazement of joy that they were all the living she
had known. Their faces were transfigured, each in its own beauty, beyond
what she remembered of them...They were pure identities and she knew
them every one without calling their names or remembering what relation
she bore to them. (159)
What is missing from Miranda’s transcendent vision, however, is the
presence of those who have died, the ones invoked as the novella opens.
Coming back to life in search of what she had “forgotten” – the dead – she
finds that Adam is among them. Like Woolf, then, Porter examines the
apparent split between the reasoning, seemingly essential self and the fluid
self whose boundaries seem permeable. The reasoning self is able to “balance” on the continuum of delirium and sanity, in Miranda’s case as well as
in Clarissa’s.
One aspect of the argument that Woolf s work effaces binary oppositions is found not only in the attempt to speak the unspeakable, but simply
in the continuum between Clarissa’s thoughts and those of Septimus. In her
essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf ponders “what does one mean by the
‘unity of the mind’?...for clearly the mind has so great a power of concentrating at any point, at any moment that it seems to have no single state of
being” (1929: 51-52). Woolf s argument here for the fluid self has an unperturbed tone, and it is this very tone which seems to make Clarissa’s musing
sane rather than delusional. And when Miranda emerges from her days of
illness and delirium, she arms herself to face a life without Adam in a way
that suggests a triumph of clear-eyed saneness over delirium and loss.
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“POST”-DILEMMAS
Additionally, if Miranda’s independence, intellectual work, and questioning of the War imply a degree of androgyny, the novella’s ending reinforces this idea. After Miranda has survived only to find that Adam had died
early in her own illness, she hears the celebratory sounds that cancel out
the “gong” of the War: the Armistice. Now that there is nothing to live for,
Miranda, feeling like “an alien who does not like the country... does not
understand the language nor wish to learn it,” now arms herself with a
cologne and lipstick, “a walking stick of silvery wood with a silver knob,”
and grey “gauntlets,” to re-enter life. Her last thought, after allowing herself
one last vivid fantasy of Adam, is that she must face “the dead cold light of
tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything” (1962: 165).
Miranda has faced terrifying delusions in her illness, yet she emerges
from her delirium to face life and loss sanely. Further, when near death, she
has felt one with others, perceived as “pure identities,” but not needing to
be named; this notion of not requiring language in order to be one with others touches more on the transcendent than on the delusional.
Writing about Woolf, James Naremore has discussed the psychological aspects of Woolf’s attempts to get at “life itself,” an impulse which he
says is “increasingly adapted to the blurring of subject object distinctions”
(Naremore 1972: 132). The sense of a character’s separateness juxtaposed
with a desire to “merge with the world” is identified, as Naremore notes, by
R.D. Laing with schizophrenia. Merging with, or being engulfed by the
world, may result in “terror.” Laing describes a young man’s fear as debilitating because “he knew of no halfway stage between radical isolation... or
complete absorption into all there was” (Laing 1970: 91) The terror is of “the
loss of identity involved in this merging or fusing of the self” (Laing1970: 91).
In Miranda’s heaven and Clarissa’s imagined afterlife there is no identity and
no need for one. Both Miranda and Clarissa might be distinguished by the
ability of both to hold Laing’s two impulses in balance, even in the face of
the loss or imperfection of love. Fighting her way back from death for
Adam’s sake, Miranda finds herself alone, but a “salvaged” rather than shattered self.
In the end, female androgyny, achieved in some aspects of Miranda’s
and Clarissa’s experience, can enrich the female “branch” of the malefemale binary, but its creativity has no power to alter the powerful grip of
patriarchal forces of domination. So Sir William will go on enforcing “proportion”; men like Adam will offer themselves in an unreflective response
192
to male destiny; Septimus will throw himself onto the palings. Yet sanity and
madness are presented as a continuum, not a polarity, and in Woolf’s and
Porter’s use of language, their forcing of its logic, even in language’s failure
to represent, a sort of effacing of binaries occurs. Richard fails to tell Clarissa
he loves her, but brings flowers, strands of thought and affection bind
friends and strangers in London, Miranda finds restoration and transcendence as well as loss in the embrace of death; Clarissa confirms her life
even in the moment of admiring Septimus’ act of suicide. Thus in both
works, through moments of intensity, whether delusional or not, the
unspeakable is expressed, and the inexpressible is spoken.
References
Barker, P. 1991. Regeneration. New York and London: Viking.
Garvey, Johanna X. K. 1991. “Difference and Continuity: The Voices of Mrs.
Dalloway.”, in College English, Vol. 53, No. 1, January, pp. 59-76.
Kane, Julie. 1995. “Varieties of Mystical Experience in the Writings of Virginia Woolf”,
in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 41, No. 4, Winter, pp. 328-349.
Laing, R.D. 1970. The Divided Self. Baltimore: Penguin Books.
Naremore, J. 1972. “A World Without a Self: The Novels of Virginia Woolf”, in Novel,
Vol. 5, no. 2, Winter, pp. 122-134.
Porter, Katherine Anne. 1962 (1936). Pale Horse, Pale Rider. New York: Harcourt.
Rose, Phyllis. 1978. A Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf London: Routledge
and K. Paul.
Schorer, M. 1962. “Afterword”, in Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter.
New York: Harcourt, Inc.
Stelmach, Kathryn. 2006. “From Text to Tableau: Ekphrastic Enchantment in Mrs.
Dalloway and To the Lighthouse”, in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 38, No 3, Fall
2006, pp. 304-326.
Woolf, Virginia. 1925. Mrs. Dalloway. New York: Harcourt, Inc.
Woolf, Virginia. 1973 (1929). A Room of One’s Own. London: Grafton.
“THE GREAT GOD PAN IS DEAD!” THE ECOLOGICAL ELEGY
OF WILLIAM BURROUGHS’ GHOST OF CHANCE
CHAD WEIDNER
The Roosevelt Academy University Honors College
Utrecht University
Abstract: The paper explores some of the profound political strains that work
throughout William Burrough’s fiction. Many of the investigations done to date
about William Burroughs are sentimental and nostalgic rather than
scholarly. Now that Burroughs’ oeuvre is complete, it is time to reflect on the
entirety of his work. This analysis will attempt to reveal some of the codified
ideology in Ghost of Chance, a novella published many years after the
publication of Burrough’s most controversial work.
Introduction
William S. Burroughs was a core member of the Beat Generation.
Scholars and critics have described his novels (as well as the wider work of
the Beat Generation) as a reaction to mid 20th century consumerism and the
Cold War uncertainties. Jeffrey Falla has previously suggested a possible relationship between the Beats and the agrarian West of America, “Beat philosophy centers on a return to an American individualism which had as its core
the myth of the pioneer” (2000: 24). Can parallels between the politics of
seemingly antipatriotic Burroughs and the original patriot Jefferson be
found? What might such a revelation tell us about Burroughs’ views on government and ecology? Critics have long wrestled with the problem of pinning
Burroughs down as a conservative — or radical — or art revolutionary. Many
believe that his work defies genre (was he a narrator of the grotesque, black
comedian, absurdist?) Literary agrarianism places Burroughs in the long tradition of rural American thinkers, especially Thomas Jefferson.
Literary Agrarianism
I posit that a new conceptual model can be created from elements of
anarchy, classical Marxism, and Jeffersonian ideas of government and
agrarianism. Literary agrarianism attempts to place a given work into histor-
196
ical and political context by measuring it against the agricultural and political origins of the United States. This model is limited to American literature.
According to agrarianism, farming is a righteous occupation. It considers
the city, money, and the church as potentially evil in that they limit natural
human freedoms. Agrarianism, though, tries to flesh out the contextual relationship between a given text and American notions of agriculture and government. In effect, I have pressed together three different ideological concepts, in varying degrees, to create a new lens to examine texts.
Agrarianism recognizes the importance of nature. In this respect, it
could be described as having similarities to ecocriticism. The goal of the
concept, however, is different. As classical Marxism tries to put a given text
into the context of class revolution, ecocriticism (and environmental criticism) seek out the relationship between texts and environmental praxis.
Literary agrarianism is interested in fleshing out an ideology of agronomy,
and as such examines a text in a more theoretical way.
Now that Burroughs has been deceased for nearly a decade, perhaps
it is time to reexamine his work in a new context. Burroughs greened as he
grew older. His late works especially move towards an environmental consciousness. In Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Florian Vetsch (2003) argued that in
Ghost of Chance, Burroughs has moved in the direction of politically
engaged ecological writing, “Burroughs’ trickreich mit Synchronien arbeitende Prosa legt neben der ökologischen auch eine hellsichtig
wahrgenommene politische Dimension frei…ein brandaktuelles, wundersam komponiertes Alterswerk gelungen, ein verwuchert glühendes
Plädoyer für die Formenvielfalt der Natur.“ Others have described
Burroughs’ feelings of absolute hopelessness at imminent environmental
catastrophe. As Shirlaw (2002) argues, “Ghost of Chance is alienating.
Burroughs seeks to retrieve the irrevocable, the futility of which leaves the
novella with a sadness bordering on elegy.” If others have already argued
that Burroughs’ writing contains an ecological component, then what is the
point of this study? What is new here? I respectfully submit that the concept
of literary agrarianism can provide even deeper historical and political
meaning into Burroughs and his writing than simply placing him into the
same tent as fellow Beat Gary Snyder.
William Burroughs’ Ghost of Chance is a novella, containing just 58
pages. It appeared late in Burroughs’ career. It was published in 1991, some
32 years after the publication of the influential novel Naked Lunch. The dis-
197
tance between the two books is in some ways larger than the three decades
that separate them. Naked Lunch is wholly scatological. It is difficult to read
as there are no customary notions of plot, setting or theme. The work can
hardly be described as a novel. It might be more appropriate to describe it
as a series of sketches, some satirical, but most revolving around descriptions of paranoid visions, homosexual promiscuity, and the quest to acquire
and use drugs. Ghost of Chance, on the other hand, while still displaying
Burroughs fascination with a derangement of the senses, though, is softer
in its tone. The book is overall much more accessible than Naked Lunch.
Literary agrarianism puts the two books in the same class, however, as they
both promote lesser control from ruling forces. Both books are critical of the
church and promote broad individual liberties. While Naked Lunch could
be described as an anti-urban book, Ghost of Chance can be described as
ecologically conscious.
After the novella was published, many of the same old criticisms were
made: Burroughs was still a literary idiot, an obscene and hackneyed recycler of used images. Will Self (1995) criticized Burroughs’ uneven use of
footnotes and citations in a review in The Guardian, “[M]uch of what
Burroughs says in the lively and idiosyncratic footnotes to this text is
hideously unpalatable”. Admittedly, Burroughs does try to bring a scientific
and impartial approach to the novella, an approach that is perhaps less than
fully successful. This attempt at journalistic detachment and objectivity is
common even in Burroughs’ early work.
Naked Lunch is written in a chaotic, freecutting style that is more
muted in Ghost of Chance. If Naked Lunch is chaotic, then Ghost of Chance
is at times coherent. Both books seem to be a kind of warning in support of
individual liberties against monolithic forces. Some critics find Burroughs’
style flawed or even silly. As Kalka (2003:36) writes, “Hier jedoch erscheint
es nicht als Strategie, als literarische Form, sondern als kunstlose, bare
Albernheit.” Throughout Burroughs’ career, he was criticized time and time
again for not fitting into established genres. It is not surprising that some critics found his work indigestible, as it does not easily fit into their notions of
genre.
Libertania
The setting of Ghost of Chance is a settlement called Libertania. It is
located on the West coast of Madagascar, far away from the developed
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world and its emphasis on consumption and hurried production. Burroughs
provides the reader a version of an apparently failed historical attempt by a
group of pirates to create a free and independent state. The choice of using
former pirates as settlers in a utopian setup is important in the agrarian context. Pirates are certainly those who live outside established laws.
Burroughs’ employment of pirates as ideological pioneers would suggest
that Burroughs at least believed that those who have lived outside established social structures have an appreciation for personal liberties that those
who have not.
The protagonist of the book is Captain Mission, a name that could have
been drawn from a comic book. The protagonist’s mission here is not to
defeat Godzilla but to establish a new world. In the story, the settlers draw
up a limited constitution based on respect for both nature and individual
freedoms. The establishment of a perfect place, away from old corrupt and
oppressive systems mirrors the founding of the American colonies. Just as
the American colonies sought refuge from oppressive monarchial and religious institutions, Captain Mission seeks refuge for his band of liberty loving
pirates from the overwhelming and encircling power of the developed
world. The emphasis in this settlement, though, is not religious freedom, but
freedom from economic pressures and ecological contamination.
There is serenity in the rural community that Captain Mission and his
ex-pirates have founded. “He saw the settlement, the freshly molded red
bricks and thatch already timeless as houses in fairyland” (Burroughs 1991:
3) History tells us that Utopia is impossible, and the hint that the settlement
is a fairytale land makes the temporary balance clear to the reader. For a
short time, it does appear that humans are able to live in equilibrium with
nature. The community works together to solve the most basic of human
problems, the need to eat, “A reed…a loaf of bread…A bird wheels in the
sky. A woman plucks feathers from a fowl, takes a loaf of bread from an
adobe oven.” (13) The basic social code of the settlement is do as you
please, as long as it does not harm anyone else or the animals that also
inhabit the area.
In the book, as was not so uncommon during the late 18th century in
America, disagreements that could not be resolved through debate are settled by duel. In Ghost of Chance, this practice was spelled out in Article 23
of the settlement’s constitution. The article describes how if no resolution to
a disagreement between two individuals in the settlement can be found,
199
that the issue could be settled in a fair duel (1991: 7). Captain Mission challenges Bradley to a duel after he kills a lemur for a mango. Bradley, who was
purportedly a very bad shot, had the right to refuse the duel, which he did.
This refusal, according to custom, grants Captain Mission the victory, and
the losing party must depart from the camp before sunset. In the context of
literary agrarianism, the idea of the duel as a means to resolve disagreements is significant in that by having a duel provision in the settlement’s
constitution, both parties did not need to rely on a magistrate or court to
resolve the disagreement.
Early in the story, Burroughs describes the relationship between the
protagonist, Captain Mission, and those who lived as equals in the community, “He picked up his staff and walked out through the settlement, stopping here and there to talk to the settlers” (1). Thomas Jefferson would have
appreciated the limited formal authority of the local government. The rules
of the colony are described in a concise constitution, which is widely recognized and understood by all who live in the settlement. Jefferson would
have also respected the attempt to balance progress in such things as vaccines with a rural concern for keeping the region uncontaminated by industry. There are no apartment blocks in Libertania, nor are there convenience
stores. Instead, villagers make clay bricks or even inhabit ancient cave
dwellings.
People live alongside a diverse (but threatened) group of passive
lemurs. The group has realized a new Eden. Predictably though, the social
order breaks down. Captain Mission begins to have terrible nightmares
prophesizing the coming slaughter. When describing a gloomy encounter
between Captain Mission and a lemur deer, Burroughs writes, “Slowly the
animal raised one paw and touched his face, stirring memories of the
ancient betrayal. Tears streaming down his face, he stroked the animal’s
head…There is always something a man must do in time. For the deer ghost
there was no time.” (5) Soon thereafter, Bradley kills a lemur for stealing a
piece of fruit. This one killing starts a terrible chain of events.
In the end, humans follow and brutally slaughter all of the remaining
lemurs. It seems that nothing can placate the human lust for the blood of
the lemurs. A black monkey creature “sing[s] a black song, harsh melody of
a blackness too pure” (18). Human brutality is not limited to the destruction
of the lemurs, however. In their killing frenzy, the humans go on to slaughter all animals, and in doing so extinguish most animal life, “The last
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Tasmanian wolf limps through a blue twilight, one leg shattered by a
hunter’s bullet” (18). In their unchecked slaughter, the humans have in
effect opened a Pandora’s Box in the Museum of Lost Species. Captain
Mission is informed that “a joint French and English expeditionary force was
on the way to attack his free pirate settlement” (20). He understands the
coming doom.
The Museum of Lost Species is a depository of all the earth’s extinct
biological organisms, including long forgotten, but terribly potent bacterial
and viral diseases. Once the museum is cracked open by reckless human
violence, it unleashes brutal retaliation on all of humanity. A disease spreads
from the African mainland to Europe and America. “[T]heir veins were filled
not with blood but with a yellow-green ichor that gave off a horrible stench”
(33). Quickly, tens of millions succumb to what is called the ‘Christ
Sickness’. After everything that humanity has accomplished - from ancient
Babylonian rhetoricians to space travel, all that remains is “rotten urine, the
reek of man’s sojourn on earth” (33).
Subsequently in the book, in a pseudo-scholarly exposition, Burroughs
traces the origins of the current ecological crisis to the rise of Christianity
over pantheism. His attempt at academic writing includes the use of ineffective footnotes and citations. The book might have been more powerful
had he not tried so hard to inject factual support into the piece, evidence
which seems more peculiar and make-believe than convincing. In the
novella, Christ himself returns to pass his final judgment of humanity, and
the four horsemen of the apocalypse destroy almost all of the peoples of the
earth with resurrected primordial diseases. I posit that the novella was a
warning from an elderly man who was not only concerned about the environment, but was likely reflecting on his own mortality when writing the
book.
Literary Agrarianism acknowledges a debt to classical Marxism in that
it sheds light onto economic pressures and the consequences of private
enterprise on normal humans. One can find evidence of class-consciousness, or at least repulsion of unbridled capitalism in Ghost of Chance.
Burroughs describes what he calls the Board — a shadowy organization of
men who dictate global social and economic policy. He writes about the
way they distract the populace from real issues by fabricating problems
where, supposedly, they do not exist, “To distract their charges from the
problems of overpopulation, resource depletion, deforestation, pandemic
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pollution of water, land, and sky, they inaugurated a war against drugs. This
provided a pretext to set up an international police apparatus designed to
suppress dissidence on an international level” (29-30). Burroughs makes a
link between profit mongering, environmental destruction, and the attack
on personal liberties in one massive swoop.
Burroughs goes on to describe the death of entire species at the hand
of money grubbing men. “The last deer lemur falls to a hunter’s arrow.
Passenger pigeons rain on the plates of fat bankers and politicians with their
gold watch chains and gold fillings. The humans belch out the last passenger pigeon” (18). Burroughs was opposed to all forms of oppressive institutions, and as one such force, capitalism was an adversary. In his later work,
Burroughs seems to associate profit with mindless environmental destruction. In Ghost of Chance, Burroughs traces the folly of the Board.
Shortsighted and focused only on profit, the Board overlooks and ignores
the need to keep the Museum of Lost Species sealed. “The Board had
indeed lost interest in…the Museum of Lost Species” (29). Throughout
Burroughs’ career, he routinely railed against banks, insurance companies,
and debt collectors. He viewed such organizations as selfish and aggressive,
and advocated economic fraud as a legitimate form of civil disobedience.
In Ghost of Chance, Burroughs writes that after the four horsemen destroy
a world built on exploitation and profit, “[The board’s] power, which
depended on manipulation through money and political contacts, is gone”
(54). Interestingly, Burroughs’ suspicion of business was shared by
Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with debt. In a letter he wrote to
James Madison (1789), he advocates the abolition of intergenerational debt,
“[T]he earth belongs in usufruct to the living…the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” Richard Latner (1997: 883-84) has argued that the federalists had a decidedly different view of debt than Jefferson and Madison,
and that Jefferson saw the federalist economic plans as tantamount to support for a new kind of monarchy.
Is Christianity a Virus?
According to the tenets of Literary Agrarianism as I have put forward,
the church is potentially evil in that it limits natural human freedoms.
Certainly one could argue that organized religion has caused and continues
to cause great suffering throughout the world. Certainly the origins of the
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religion are obscure at best, and at worst the creation of a few men long
after the death of Christ. Thomas Jefferson certainly had suspicions of
organized Christianity. Jefferson pondered the uncertain origins of the Bible
in a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush (1803), and remarked that the Bible was
written by “the most unlettered & ignorant men”.
In Ghost of Chance, Burroughs repeatedly denounces Christianity. He
first describes the ability of Christ to heal others, “With the fingers of his right
hand he touches the wound, which knits and seals under his touch. Not
even a scar remains” (23). Burroughs then describes the hypocrisy of only
healing those with faith — while not healing suffering animals, like lemurs
and cats. When the Museum of Lost Species is opened, terrible and ancient
diseases are unleashed upon all of humanity, not just those guilty of ecocide. Burroughs describes the diseases in terrifying detail and counts the
deaths by the multitudes, “It is estimated that a hundred million died of the
Christ Sickness” (35).
Literary agrarianism suggests that the church is potentially evil. In the
book, “The four horseman ride through ruined cities,” (54) harvesting ripe
human lives with cruelty and cool indifference. Only in the countryside are
there some who survive the slaughter, and people in the great empty spaces
(who live closer to nature) must defend themselves against the vociferous
hoards fleeing urban death, “Outside the compounds, total chaos reigned
as the plagues raged unchecked, and all pretense of law and order had long
since been abandoned. The country was dotted by fortresses, to ward off
foraging bands from the starving cities” (54).
Burroughs explains the almost absurd notions of forgiveness inherent
in Christian belief, specifically the idea of turning the other cheek.
Burroughs writes, “The teachings of Christ read like biological suicide. Shall
the deer seek out the leopard and offer its throat to his fangs? Shall fish
impale themselves on hooks and into nets? No animal species could survive
by seeking out and loving its enemies” (26). Indeed it is difficult to turn the
other cheek if one is lying in a pool of blood. In the book, after Burroughs
goes after a key principle of Christian doctrine, he does concede the difficulties of forgiving others and that, “There are few things more difficult than
loving your enemies” (26).
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A Contradiction of Arms
As in Burroughs other books, guns are still a central element in Ghost
of Chance. Firearms hold a special place in American culture. How could
the American insurgency have succeeded against the British without the
small arms of farmers? Thomas Jefferson often carried a small pistol, and
hoped to never be forced into using it. He was a firm believer in the right to
bear arms, and even tried to get second amendment-like legislation drawn
into the Virginia State Constitution. It is no surprise then, that guns are
viewed as such a fundamental and central place to American ideas of liberty. William Burroughs carried this tradition throughout his wider work, as
well as in Ghost of Chance.
Burroughs’ description and admiration of guns, while consistent
throughout his works, is at times paradoxical. It is no surprise that in an
ideal community such as Libertania, the right to have, own, and carry
weapons is essential. “Captain Mission strapped on his double-barreled
flintlock, which he kept loaded with shot charges, and thrust a scabbarded
cutlass under his belt” (1991: 1). I believe that Burroughs attempts to provide us humans with an ecological warning in the novel, a warning to
restrict harmful activities. Do not weapons, then, represent the qualities of
perfect human technological destruction?
Burroughs himself makes reference, “Beauty is always doomed. ‘They
evil and armed draw near.’ Homo Sap with his weapons, his time, his insatiable greed, and ignorance so hideous it can never see its own face” (17)
If, in Burroughs’ eyes, humans should be allowed to own weapons, then
why not allow them to have larger, more efficient weapons? When does the
right to bear arms become secondary to the needs of the collective to be
safe from random acts of violence? When does the right to own weapons
become superseded by the needs of the environment? If guns are allowed,
then why not machine guns, grenades, or even neutron bombs? This apparent contradiction is not resolved in the novel.
Conclusion
In previous novels, Burroughs perhaps focused more on the struggle
between the individual and oppressive controlling forces in the state, the
church, and banks. Burroughs mellowed. He no longer rolls drunks on the
New York subway or needs to pop heroin in the mainline. His main con-
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cerns are animals threatened by human ignorance and irresponsible conceit.
The book as a whole is one of the more accessible Burroughs texts. In
the literary agrarian context, is Ghost of Chance successful? It is, in the
sense that Burroughs effectively dramatizes the environmental threats facing humanity. The book continues Burroughs’ concern for continued
human existence in an age of catastrophe — though the concern this time
is not only political, but also ecological. In Times Literary Supplement,
Isobel Shirlaw (2002) has argued that Burroughs is actually writing himself
into a corner, “Burroughs seeks to retrieve the irrevocable, the futility of
which leaves the novella with a sadness bordering on elegy.” It is as if
Burroughs has traveled to the future, and has come back with an obituary
written about the earth. As Will Self described (1995), “[T]he generative
force for the narrative (such as it is) comes from the author’s own preoccupations with global environmental catastrophe.” Near the end of the novella, Burroughs makes an impassioned plea for funding for the Duke
University Primate Center, which breeds lemurs in captivity in an attempt to
circumvent extinction.
In Ghost of Chance, Burroughs explores the logical end result of contemporary economic trends and suggests, persuasively, that a milder form
of human existence would be preferable to current models of human economic and social structures. Ghost of Chance is one of his most compelling
works, in that he has somewhat softened his dogmatic rebuke of all control
systems to what could be described as a mournful reflection on the current
environmental crisis. Was he trying to save humanity from its own, “vast
mud-slide of soulless sludge”? (19) The book not only provides a black
image of the future. After the plagues have reduced the potential danger of
humanity in the book, “People of the world…at last [return] to their source
in spirit, back to the little lemur people of the trees and the leaves, the
streams, the rocks, and the sky.” (54) As such, even in Burroughs’ eyes,
there is still a sliver of hope for humanity.
References
Burroughs, W. S. 1991. Ghost of Chance. New York: Library Fellows of the Whitney
Museum of American Art.
Falla, J. B. 2000. “Becoming Outsider: The Cold War, Masculinity, and the Beat
Generation.” Dissertation. University of Minnesota.
205
Jefferson, T. 1803. “Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush.” Washington (available at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/index.html).
Jefferson, T. 1814. “Letter to Horatio G. Spafford.” (available at
Jefferson, T. 1789. “Letter to James Madison.” Paris (available at
Jefferson,
T.
1786.
“Letter
to
Richard
Henry”
(available
at
Kalka, J. 2003. “Die Ganze Affenbande Brüllt: Überflüssige Hassesmüh: Ein Spätwerk
Von William Burroughs“, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, p. 36.
Latner, R. B. 1997. “Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (Review)”, in The
American Historical Review 102.3, pp. 883-84.
Self, W. 1995. “Strange Cats”, in Guardian Unlimited, August 11.
Shirlaw, Isobel. 2002. ‘Review of Ghost of Chance.’ Times Literary Supplement,
November 15.
Vetsch, F. 2003. “Rezensionsnotiz”, in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, February 12.
THE POWER OF ATTRACTION IN THE NARRATIVE
OF SOAP OPERAS
MARIA BAJNER
University of Pécs
Abstract: The analysis raises several questions in relation to soap operas.
What positions do readers, viewers, or listeners identify with, given that they
are already socially conditioned men and women? What positions are available for the female (and male) audience? The answers to these questions are
linked to broader gender divisions which soap operas both question and develop as a source of pleasure.
Soap operas are immensely popular cultural forms, attracting more
than 2 million viewers each day in Hungary alone, the majority of whom are
female, according to information available on www.mediainfo.hu. While
the soap opera audience is both male and female, the soap opera genre
carries heavily feminine connotations in contemporary culture, as it has
been marketed and addressed to women since its early twentieth-century
radio-broadcast origins. The soap opera continued the tradition of women’s
domestic fiction of the nineteenth century, which had also endured in the
magazine stories of the 1920s and 1930s. It also drew upon the conventions
of the “woman’s film” of the 1930s. The primary target audience for soap
operas — women working at home — was supposed to integrate the viewing of these shows into their daily routines. According to Ann Gray (1987:
48), soap operas form an important part of female viewers’ everyday lives
and give focus to a female culture which they share. Such an approach
either narrows its ramifications by specifying the kinds of women it
describes (in terms of class, race, sexual orientation, nationality, age, etc.)
or runs the risk of invoking a universalized “woman” whose affiliation with
the codes of femininity is assumed as a norm. Watching soaps is as much a
proof of femininity, as soap opera aversion is a sign of a Noble prize candidate. The real issue is not the individual or gendered difference in tastes, but
rather the structural and ideological features that explain the genre’s unbroken popularity.
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Although their consumer value is high, soap operas can boast little
appreciation in academic circles. Scholars’ reluctance to soap operas arises from the marginal status of the genre itself. If we now have “gendered
genres” in television studies, soaps are considered to be the most feminine
of them all: Tania Modleski (1984) cites statistics showing that 90 percent of
soap viewers in the early 1980s were women, and she and other feminist
theorists have shown how the multiple climaxes, slow-paced, weak action,
the lack of closure, the constantly shifting points of view, the priority of dialogues over action, and the depictions of female power so common in daytime soaps mark them as a specifically feminine alternative to masculine
narrative traditions.
Moreover, soap opera texts continue to perpetuate such myths of the
dominant culture as the primacy of heterosexual marriage, the irrevocability of blood-ties between mothers and children, and the priority of white
upper middle class citizens’ concerns over those of other racial and ethnic
groups. Dallas, the program that sparked the primetime soap boom of the
1980s in the US, not only borrowed the serial from daytime soaps, but also
the structuring device of the extended family (the Ewings), complete with
patriarch, matriarch, good son, bad son and in-laws, all of whom lived in the
same Texas-sized house. The kinship and romance plots that could be generated around these family members were believed to be the basis for
attracting female viewers, while Ewing Oil’s boardroom intrigues would
draw adult males, accustomed to watching “masculine” genres (western,
crime, and legal dramas).
Feminist recuperations of soap opera have most recently relied upon
explications of how viewers use those texts for feminist ends: to satisfy
unconscious drives towards female power, to serve as the focus for communities of friends whose conversations about the plots can be critical or
carnivalesque, and hence subversive of the plots’ apparent ideologies.
‘Feminine emotional experience’ does not emanate from the female body
or even from any given woman’s psychology. It is a process structured by
culturally produced and received intensities. For some viewers, the intensity of emotions is a form of background noise in a life otherwise detached
from the concerns of the soap opera plot, for others — particularly those
who are moved enough by the storyline to want to write about it on-line —
the intensities are more present, more vividly part of daily consciousness. To
watch every day is to be carried on that wave of intensities, to experience
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the build-ups, the crises, and the undertow of response as one of the structuring principles of daily life. To watch every day — to have your emotional
life structured, however subtly, by that wave pattern — is to be continually
re-gendered, whether you are male or female, whether you experience the
feelings as “genuine emotions” or “intensities,” whether you view this
process as part of the oppression of women or as an opportunity for celebrating white, middle class, feminine experience. In focusing on gender
rather than sex in my analysis of soap opera viewing, I mean specifically to
include those men who are as dedicated to watching soaps as their female
counterparts, and who are, in that sense, full participants in this aspect of
feminine culture.
Although soap opera texts are relatively open to different interpretations, they do require certain types of knowledge to draw on in order to
make sense of the program. These include familiarity with the genre, with
the history or the specific soap opera, and with the wider cultural competence of marriage, family and personal life (Dyer 1987: 14). This is a kind of
competence that does not depend on gender.
The analysis of the narrative structure of soap operas reveals that they
amalgamate elements of genres traditionally attracting male or female audience. Dallas is just about emotions. And as everything in Texas is always
said to be larger, bigger and huger than life, so is Texas emotion. The narrative is defined by such an emotional wave pattern that gives rise to the story
and satisfies the rhythm of both melodrama and whodunit. Before I analyzed and sketched the dominant emotions represented in individual
episodes over five weeks (of Season 1), it had been my impression that particular episodes tend to be unified around the representation of certain sets
of emotions: there are anxious scenes, angry scenes, jealous scenes, desperate scenes, etc. My analysis of all the scenes in those episodes indicates
that this is generally true, that each episode is dominated by characters populating various subplots, expressing a particular subset of all the emotions
available to soap opera diegeses. A typical example of that is the ‘anxious’
scene where Cliff Barnes (who is a constant loser) is discussing the latest
news about his rival, JR, with his mother and where nine different emotions
(nine different subplots) back up the leading emotion, his embitterment.
The five episodes are similarly dominated by the expression of angst,
in the forms of worry, concern, tension, dread, suspense, depression, and
unsatisfied sexual desire, except for the last episode that functions as the
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crisis point in a particular storyline, where the dominant emotions are
revenge, terror, and erotic gratification. The emotional wave pattern cuts
across the familiar six-day pattern of a “mini-climax” each week, and a
smaller “cliffhanger” every other week, in that it seems to function within a
cycle of 23 to 29 episodes. (The first season was a pilot year with only
five episodes). After two weeks of tension/worry/suspense/anxiety, one or
more of the subplots will culminate in a crisis day of rage/terror/anger. Even
the most intense of crisis days will be broken up by some brief scenes from
other subplots reflecting happiness, warmth, or affection, scenes which are
also always present during the days that build up to and recover from the
crisis. This wave pattern contributes to the rhythm of suspense in the serial
form, and results from the form’s radical resistance to closure: no subplot is
ever really resolved as the undertow of emotional repercussion after the crisis keeps the pattern of affect constantly moving. In this important respect,
soap opera is unique among melodramatic forms. Daniel Gerould, summarizing the Russian Formalists’ model of melodramatic structures, states that
melodramas typically “move in tiers.” In Gerould’s opinion (1991), what is
characteristic for melodramatic composition is not a straight rise to the culminating point and then a lowering of tension until the conclusion, but
rather a movement in tiers by which each new phase of the plot with its
new ‘obstacles’ and no ‘resolution’ gives rise to new degrees of dramatic
intensity. The “movement in tiers” resembles the wave pattern in that there
is never a single climax to a plot, as each new complication builds more
“dramatic intensity.” But whereas the stage melodrama or its novelistic
counterparts eventually will reach the final moments of the denouement,
the soap opera text never does. The intensity continues unabated, each season finishes of with a highly dramatic cliffhanger, where one or several characters’ lives are left in the balance, for over 365 episodes throughout 14
years and more, (with the last episodes Conundrum 1 and 2) as the spectator’s heightened dramatic perception is never fully dissipated.
Another structural feature of soap operas comes into play here. Soap
operas have no ultimate narrative closure, thus preventing viewers from
forming long-term expectations for plots. While there are a number of ongoing subplots, conflicts are never totally resolved, given the on-going
nature of the program in which audiences can tune in at any time and
understand the story. Soap operas have, according to John Fiske (1987:
180), an “infinitely extended middle,” in that they never end, and can never
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be resolved completely. There is always the threat of change in the future.
Events cannot be read in relation to a complete story, because soap operas
do not end neatly. This makes soap operas unpredictable in the long run.
One can, for example, anticipate that two characters may in the near future
get together because of the daily development of their relationship, but one
cannot foresee that they will still be together in ten years time.
Rather than concentrating on long-term goals and events, the soap
opera narrative focuses on the reactions and emotions of characters as they
live through constant change, disruption and temporary resolutions to plots
that will eventually change and continue to develop in unexpected ways. In
soap operas, life goes on after the happy ending. Because of this particular
narrative feature, the soap opera text as a whole can be characterized as
“open,” as opposed to “closed,” texts which have specific, predetermined
paths and ways of reading and interpreting (Fiske 1987: 180). A widely distributed single program, such as Dallas, with ‘non-controversial’ contents
may not be an agent of homogenization after all, for to reach its multitude
of diverse audiences it must be an “open” text that allows for a great deal
of cultural diversity in its readings, and thus provides considerable semiotic
space for the receiving cultures or subcultures to negotiate their meanings,
rather than the ones preferred by the broadcasters.
The narrative structure of soap operas gives some insight into how
viewers can become involved in the program. Narrative structure and flow
have often been regarded as chronological movements of actions in a text,
but there is another axis of movement and action that is particularly relevant
to soap operas. This axis is an associative one which moves the viewer
through the network of characters, rather than forward in the sequence of
actions in the plot of the program. Soap operas are complex, with large
casts of characters and intricate, labyrinthine plot lines which develop slowly over large periods of time, sometimes measured in years. This type of
structure helps make sense of these complexities by focusing on character
and history instead of action.
Drawing on structural linguistics in its analysis of language and narrative, it is useful when looking at soap opera narrative structure to distinguish
between the syntagmatic axis of structure, which is sequential, and the paradigmatic axis, which is associative (Allen 1985: 69). The syntagrnatic axis
in soap operas can be seen as the temporal sequence of events, the story
lines and plot outlines. The paradigmatic axis, on which I will concentrate,
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operates in a different manner, and is in fact one of the most significant features in soap operas (Allen 1985: 70-72). This axis of structure focuses the
viewer’s attention not on the sequence of events, but on the reverberations
of the event through the character network of the show. It is the discussion
and interpretation of an action by various characters that amplifies its significance to all of their lives, and to future plot developments of these characters. I use Allen’s terminological distinction between the “naive” viewer,
who tunes into a soap episode for the first time, and the “experienced”
viewer, who knows the backstory. As Allen explains, the “naive viewer can
only read syntagmatically, from event to event, whereas the experienced
viewer performs a paradigmatic reading, recognizing the pattern among
events that unfold over the long term. The experienced viewer attains a
level of literacy in soap-opera convention that makes it possible to interpret
the broad strokes of an episode of a soap he or she has never seen before,
approaching one of his or her ‘own’ soaps, the experienced viewer has the
competency needed to fill in the gaps that necessarily occur in the daily
diegeses” (Allen 1985: 85).
Viewers themselves enter vicariously into the fictional soap opera
community. There are many long-term viewers, some of whom have been
watching soap operas for as long as 35 years. Soap operas are organized
around the calendrical cycle of the ‘real’ world in which viewers live, i.e.
Christmas on soap operas occurs at Christmas our time. The lives of characters thus run parallel to the lives of viewers in time Thus, it is time, and
not plot, which comes to dominate the narrative process (Geraghty 1991:
111). Feminist critics have shown how the conventions of daytime soap
operas, their reference to ‘here and now’, their concern with relationships
and reactions, the real-seemingness of the characters enable them to interact fruitfully and creatively with women’s gossip.
Dramatic events are built around talk: arguments, lies, shouting matches, accusations, false promises, and gossip, the most complex structural
component of soap opera texts. Feminists have begun to reevaluate gossip
as part of women’s culture and to argue that it can be both creative and
resistant to patriarchy. The fact that men consistently denigrate it is at least
a symptom that they recognize it as a cultural form that is outside their control. Bakhtin suggests that in an essentially literate society oral culture is
necessarily oppositional, for it bears the traces of the political position of its
subordinate subcultures. But it does more than this, it is one of the prime
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media through which these subordinated groups have resisted incorporation, have maintained their social differences (Diaz-Diocaretz 1989).
The notion of gossip, normally carrying with it a negative connotation,
can be usefully applied to soap operas on various levels. First, the specific
narrative structures of soap operas allow for a concentration on character
gossip that brings a paradigmatic depth and richness of time to soap opera
viewing. Second, gossip between viewers allows for further delving into the
histories of characters as well as providing viewers with a means of testing
out attitudes about social norms and values that are difficult to discuss in
‘real’ life situations. This second level of gossip takes it outside the text into
the lives of viewers, where it has an even larger significance. Gossip has
important social functions amongst members of a group, however loosely
associated those members may be. According to Gluckman, we all gossip,
and “...every single day, and for a large part of each day, most of us are
engaged in gossiping. I imagine that if we were to keep a record of how we
use our waking-time, gossiping would come only after ‘work’ — for some
of us — in the score” (Gluckman 1963: 307). The complexity of the narrative
of soap operas generates gossip between viewers as they fill each other in
on what has happened on the program and make predictions for possible
resolutions of story lines. Soap operas are about domestic and personal
problems: marriages, divorces, births, deaths, and all the problems involved
in marital and family relationships. They provide a basis for family and
neighborhood gossip. Through soap operas, viewers see other families on
television to which to compare their own (Geraghty 1991: 33). The meanings that are generated on soap operas are not confined to the viewing context, but carry through to everyday activities. They provide a framework for
talk for family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, even strangers (Morley and
Silverstone 1990: 46-48). Soap operas extend their popularity even further
than discussions between individual viewers. The concerns of soap operas
can be perceived to be split between the public and the personal, with the
private, personal sphere taking precedence. This recognizes and values the
emotional work women are supposed to do in the domestic sphere
(Geraghty 1991: 43). It is the personal relationships in soap operas that provide the dramatic moments. These moments provide areas that viewers
react to and discuss as a way of testing out attitudes which could not have
been so conveniently discussed had they occurred in ’real’ life. What is
important to note here is that all viewers are not in agreement as to how
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soap operas should be interpreted. There is a good deal of negotiation going
on when viewers discuss and disagree over these points (Geraghty 1991:
123). Soap operas in this indirect way provide material for discussions about
social conventions and values. Finally, the wider popularity of soap operas
extends discussions beyond the television and into the categories through
which people live through the dialogue they stimulate in the media. In these
ways, we see that the ‘idle talk’ generated by soap operas has a greater
impact on our lives than previously envisioned.
In her book Overhearing Film Dialogue (2000), Sarah Kozloff reminds
us that the women’s film, driven by emotional confession and talk, evokes
melodrama’s paradox. Building upon the earlier work of Peter Brooks and
Tania Modleski, Kozloff finds in the dialogue of women’s films an enduring
enigma. While film melodramas are verbally overexplicit, they nonetheless
“hinge around the not said, the words that cannot be spoken” (2000: 242).
Like stage melodrama from earlier centuries, the women’s film relies upon
the “melodramatic gesture” and scenarios of “tears and fainting” (240). On
the one hand, melodrama unleashes “the desire to express all” and to “utter
the unspeakable” (Brooks 1984: 4); on the other, it dramatizes “the repression of speech” and its consequence in hysterical signs (Kozloff 2000: 244).
The 1950s confessional quiz program exposes exactly this “pressure
between speech and silence” (247). Women are encouraged, indeed
required, to tell their personal stories, yet their narratives are continually
interrupted and reworked so as to emphasise the hysterical gesture and
woman-as-spectacle.
A third level of gossip about soap operas is generated by the popular
press. Magazines such as Soap Opera Digest and Soap Opera Weekly provide additional information and commentary about the programs. They can
be a useful and enjoyable guide to fans as well as soap opera community
websites with forums, chat rooms, news blog. They discuss aspects of production, and behind-the-sets politics. They have features on prominent relationships, interview actors, and keep track of what is happening with characters and actors. This provides background details for viewers to savour
and enhances the pleasures of watching, helping to broaden the paradigmatic complexity. Viewers can exchange ideas about hit episodes, stars’ private lives, exclusive interviews with show’s characters, fashion, etc., while
discussing their own experiences and finding new pals. Viewers can create
their own story, and predict that something drastic will occur to a certain
215
character after reading in a magazine or hearing through the grapevine that
a certain actor is quitting a role.
Some soap opera events reverberate even further. When Dallas’s J.R.
Ewing was shot, it made the evening news worldwide. As Stuart Hall says,
“At a certain point, the program attained a type of popularity that was not a
popularity in terms of figures and ratings. The viewers’ involvements
became something different. You couldn’t help talking about the popularity
of Dallas, because people were starting to refer to categories taken from the
serial in interpreting their own experience” (qtd. in Riegel 1996: 25). Soap
opera characters and events have become cultural phenomena. Their enormous popularity has engaged the public in discussions of domestic and
emotional issues which are normally deemed to be private (Geraghty 1991:
5). They have insinuated themselves into the categories through which people experience their everyday lives and conversations.
Women’s soap opera viewing has long been thought of by feminists
and nonfeminists as an unproductive waste of time. Critics now commonly
read soap opera as a feminist form. They point to its open-ended narrative,
the shared experience of its female and male fans, the domestic space at
the core of soap opera, and the medium’s attention to women’s experiences. Some critics go even further, arguing that women’s ‘indulgence’ in
these programs is actually liberating. In overcoming the social opposition to
the stigma attached to the feminine content and style, and engaging in soap
opera viewing, women celebrate their femininity, particularly their gendered identification with romance, relationality, intuitiveness, talkativeness,
and other aspects of emotionality. Over the last decade, most of the scholarship on soap opera’s gendered nature has repeatedly pointed out that
daytime melodramas form an integral part of popular culture and should be
seen as sites from which men and women understand the social concerns
that predominate everyday life. What we can all learn from the texts of soap
operas is how they reiterate patriarchal practices; the textual sites of pleasure and resistance they offer women viewers, and the ways in which they
oppose and yield to the dominant practices of the male owned television
industry.
References
Allen, R. C. 1985. Speaking of Soap Operas. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press.
216
Brooks, P. 1984. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Diaz-Diocaretz. M, 1989. “Bakhtin, Discourse, and Feminist Theories”, in Critical
Snares 1, 2 , pp. 121-39.
Dyer, Gillian. 1987. “‘Women and Television: An Overwiew.”, in: Women and
Television. Edited by. Helen Haer and Gillian Dyer. New York: Pandora, pp.6-16.
Fiske, J. 1987. Television Culture. New York: Methuen
Geraghty, Christine. 1991. Women and Soap Operas. A Study of Prime Time Soaps.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gerould, D. 1991. “Russian Formalist Theories of Melodrama”, in Imitations of Life:
A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama. Edited by Marcia Landy. Detroit:
Wayne Street University Press.
Gluckman, M. 1963. “Gossip and Scandal”, in Current Anthropology 4. No 3, pp. 307316.
Gray, Ann. 1987. “Behind Closed Doors. Video Recorders in the Home”, in Women
and Television. Edited by Helen Baehr and Gillian Dyer. New York: Pandora, pp.
118-129.
Kozloff, Sarah. 2000. Overhearing Film Dialogue. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Modlesky, Tania.1984. Loving with a Vengeance. Mass Produced Fantasies for
Women. New York: Methuen.
Morley, D. and R. Silverstone. 1990. “Domestic communication- technologies and
meanings”, in Media, Culture & Society 12, No. 1, pp 31-55.
THE PEDIGREE OF AMERICA’S CONSTITUTION:
AN ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION
ERIC GILDER
University of Sibiu
MERVYN HAGGER
John Lilburne Research Institute (for Constitutional Studies)
Abstract: The paper explores alternative explanations to the origins of the
American constitution. The authors’ first-hand experience in “pirate” radio
broadcasting takes them on an unexpected research journey, which leads
them to the discovery of an “alternative” figure that may have been at the basis
of modern constitutional democracy.
At this time and in this forum, raising controversy over inspiration for
the United States Constitution might appear to be somewhat puzzling, since
it would seem that this matter was settled long ago. Therefore, any new
answers to this question would appear to be better relegated to “fringe” discussions. However, in this instance the person who redirected the authors’
attention to reexamine this issue was a late United States Supreme Court
Justice.
While traditional explanations for this Constitutional inspiration offer
links to the Magna Carta of 1215; the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and the
contemporaneous works of John Locke (that were often referenced by
Thomas Jefferson in his own writings), Justice Hugo L. Black offered an
alternative and somewhat controversial pedigree worth considering (see
Dillard 1963: 34-35).
Origins of this Present Work
Origins of the authors’ present work examining that pedigree are to be
found in an unlikely chain of human events that began in Orwell’s year of
1984, for that is when news coverage of pirate radio engineers and broadcasters of the Twentieth Century briefly collided with the history of pirate
printers and publishers of the Seventeenth Century.
218
Beginning in that fabled year of “Big Brother,” a series of international
news stories about plans to revive a floating commercial offshore (“pirate”)
station slated to broadcast from a ship anchored off the coast of southern
England called “Wonderful Radio London International” (WRLI), appeared
in both broadcast and print media, over numerous dates following March
1984 (e.g., on the ‘Media Network’ program of Radio Netherlands’ World
Service; in Broadcast magazine on 23 March and in Hörzu’s radio section on
3 August in 1984, as well as on the front page of the Dallas Times Herald on
8 July, 1985). From the early 1980s onwards both Gilder and Hagger were to
various degrees associated with the revival of the “Big L” station (see Gilder
2003: 100, fn 58).
The original demise of Wonderful Radio London took place on August
14, 1967. “On that day millions tuned in to the last few hours of broadcasting …” (Gilder 2003: 88). That station died as a result of a drought in advertising revenue that had been brought about by a new draconian censorship
law which “made it a criminal offense for British citizens to work for, or to
supply an offshore broadcasting station in any form or manner, whatsoever” (Gilder 2003: 106, fn 76). The station’s second coming had been heralded as though it was a new shoot from an old root attempting to break
through the same parched soil that had killed the original venture. In the following years, however, that drought had only intensified and by 1985 it
raised a basic WRLI question: “Why can you play rock and roll all day on the
radio in America, but not in the United Kingdom?”
An Unexpected Education
During August 1985, this impromptu query soon turned into a casual
comparative study of licensing history as it relates to the development of
copyrights, publishing and broadcasting in the UK and USA (see Gilder 2003:
74-75). When Hagger randomly reached for the Book of the Year 1968 which
happened to be located near to the control board in the WRLI project studio, he began thumbing through its pages and came across an article commissioned by the encyclopedia: “Democracy’s Heritage: Free Thought, Free
Speech, Free Press” (Black 1968). The article had been written under the
byline of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, but had been actually
penned by his wife (see Black & Black 1968). Hugo Black had given his wife
“three or four very dull books to read to help me in my first draft …” (Black
& Black 1968: 164.) She was prompted to become more interested in her
219
assignment when the yearbook’s publishers, Encyclopedia Britannica,
offered her husband an additional $1,000 if he would expand his article (its
eventual length was six encyclopedia pages) (Black & Black 1968: 165).
The essence of the Blacks’ combined recital is that the story of modern constitutional democracy really began with one John Lilburne, an
Englishman who was born around the year 1617 to a family with roots in
northern England but raised to the south within the shadow of Greenwich.
Their completed article hailed Lilburne as America’s prototype ‘Founding
Father’ who became clothed in the role of an activist fighting both inside
and outside of the courtrooms of England on behalf of individual “freeborn
rights”:
… his long fight with the government made him so much a public hero
that his opponents could never secure his conviction by a jury, and after
some of his parliamentary convictions, the officers holding him in custody
had to be protected from the thongs of people who appeared to applaud
him as a friend of the people because he was a foe of the government
(Black 1968:40).
Prior to 1985, Hagger (who was born in England) had never heard of
John Lilburne, but Black claimed that the views and activities of Lilburne
and his associates:
… were the natural forerunners, if not the ancestors of the original written
constitution of the American states, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of
Rights. … The claims of Lilburne … were well known to Englishmen, their
families and friends who left England to settle in the new land of promise
in America (1968:41).
Sparked by Black’s introduction, Hagger adapted Lilburne’s
“Freeborn” prefix to his own pen name of “John England” and, together
with Gilder and co-founder Genie Baskir (who subsequently named her
daughter Jane Lilburne), changed their WRLI project into a “Four Freedoms
Federation” to continue this line of research. When the American Express
Company sponsored a 1987 tour of the United States with an eighteenwheeled truck emblazoned “Magna Carta to the Constitution — Roads to
Liberty,” the Federation challenged that interpretation with the alternative
explanation offered by Black, “Americans must know the true origins of
their rights in order to ensure they will be preserved” (‘Federation tries’
1987) and “Four Freedoms Federation says … Roads to Liberty Tour does
220
not contain any of the works of John Lilburne” (‘Activist disputes’ 1987).
One year later (31 October, 1988), Newsweek magazine contrarily referenced John Lilburne as their lead-in for “A Loss of Liberties: Britain’s War
on Terror” (1988: 47). (The article was about a then-new British law based
upon ending Lilburne’s hard-won right to remain silent when accused of a
crime, because the British would be allowed to interpret the silence of Irish
Republican Army detainees as an admission of guilt.)
By 1992 the fledgling Federation had folded, but not before its work
had been aired on a weekly radio broadcast over an international network
of stations for a period of several years, as well as on a daily cablecast within the U.S. State of Texas for over a year. It had also engaged in political
activism in an attempt to modify Texas school history textbooks by offering
challenges to their un-amended review for approval. Its work was then kept
alive by an offshoot project known as the “John Lilburne Research Institute”
(England 1992).
How Hugo Black came to Embrace “Freeborn” John
Hugo Black’s personal interest in John Lilburne had become manifest
as early as 1947 within footnote 14 of his U.S. Supreme Court lengthy Dissent
in Adamson v. California. In that opinion, Black’s focus was centered upon
the origins of the Fifth Amendment, which he traced to Lilburne’s 1637
Court of Star Chamber trial in London where attempts had been made to
force Lilburne to testify under oath against his own free will. Lilburne’s agitated response was to loudly proclaim his rights as a freeborn Englishman.
Leonard W. Levy’s 1968 Origins of the Fifth Amendment supports Black’s
interpretation of Lilburne:
No one was a greater pamphleteer. Lilburne … was the catalytic agent in
the history of the right against self-incrimination. He appeared at the right
moment (1986: 273).
When he wrote his 1947 dissent in Adamson, Black was only partially
aware of Lilburne’s contributions, but by the autumn of 1953 his interest had
really became focused:
Black’s daughter JoJo was always looking for books or ideas that could be
helpful to him. In one of her college courses, she read selections from the
Levellers … (Newman 1994: 450).
221
The Levellers were Lilburne’s Seventeenth-Century associates. When
Black read JoJo’s textbook about their proposed written constitution for
England called an “Agreement of the People,” of which there were three
major revisions and expansions, he came to regard them as “the first real
constitutionalists” (Newman 1994: 450)). Black claimed in his “Democracy”
article (1968: 41) that latter works by the Levellers were ancestors of the
U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Black’s consuming passion for Lilburne did not go unnoticed by other
Supreme Court Justices or clerks. In 1954, Justice William O. Douglas wrote
An Almanac of Liberty and devoted the dates of February 13 and 14 (pages
236-237), to a brief survey of Lilburne’s activities. When Black read Frank’s
The Levellers in 1955, one of his U.S. Supreme Court law clerks remarked
that:
it became one of the most marked-up volumes in his library. … when he
got started talking about the Levellers and especially their leader, John
Lilburne … it was hard to stop him. (Newman 1994: 450)
Towards the close of 1955, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Ullmann v.
United States, and in March 1956, Douglas wrote a dissenting opinion with
Black concurring:
Lilburn marshaled many arguments against the oath ex officio, one of
them being the sanctity of conscience and the dignity of man before God.
(Douglas also cited Lilburne’s 1653 publication The Just Defence) …
Another fundamental right I then contended for was that no mans conscience ought to be racked by oaths imposed, to answer to questions concerning himself in matters criminal, or pretended to be so (350 U.S. 422).
In 1966, Justices Black and Douglas were joined by Chief Justice Earl
Warren in reciting the works of John Lilburne. Between 28 February and 1
March of that year, Miranda v. Arizona was argued before the Court. On
June 13 Chief Justice Warren gave the Opinion of the Court:
We sometimes forget how long it has taken to establish the privilege
against self-incrimination, the sources from which it came, and the fervor
with which it was defended. … The lofty principles to which Lilburn had
appealed during his trial gained popular acceptance in England These sentiments worked their way over to the Colonies, and were implanted after
great struggle into the Bill of Rights (384 U.S. 436).
222
In 1980, page 388 of William O. Douglas’ autobiographical account of
The Court Years — 1937-1975, again focused attention upon Lilburne’s 1637
Court of Star Chamber fight for the same right that became known in
America as the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Reinterpreted Transatlantic Confusion
During the 1960s, the culture of youth began to flow back and forth like
tides whose waves lapped against the shores of both Britain and America.
With each wave came the byproducts of commercial consumerism. Just as
Little Richard had influenced Paul McCartney, so too the collective sounds
of the “British Invasion” influenced stations such as KLIF in Dallas, Texas,
which, in turn, had influenced the creation of Wonderful Radio London
funded by Texas entrepreneurs and broadcasting from offshore into
England (Gilder 2003:82).
While these entrepreneurs were embracing the Americanized spirit of
Lilburne, listeners were imbibing the Americanized spirit of Gerrard
Winstanley’s Christian Communist Diggers (or the “True Levellers) of 1649
whose name and ideas had been hijacked by a consortium of Haight
Asbury Hippies and Hells Angels in San Francisco (Grogan 1972: 237).
Rather than continuing Black’s advocacy for inalienable human rights based
upon the work of Lilburne and the Levellers, these Hippies were mimicking
Winstanley’s theme in their own slogans of “free food”, “free radio” and free
everything else in-between.
Yet the British “pirate stations” (which soon became known as “free
radio stations”) were championing the sentiment of capitalist laissez faire,
rather than communism tinged with anarchy (see Leonard 1996: 162-3 on
formation of the Free Radio Association; Bernstein 2000, which places
Winstanley and the Diggers in context with the development of Marxist
communism]; and Hill 1984, which places Lilburne, the Levellers and
Diggers in context of the seventeenth century]).
Who was John Lilburne?
John Lilburne came to the attention of the English Court of Star
Chamber when he imported a book that had been printed and published in
Holland, but not licensed by the English authorities. It was this act that
resulted in his original arrest, trial and imprisonment of 1637. He would suffer many more arrests and terms of imprisonment throughout his life.
223
Lilburne fought with Parliamentary forces in the 1640s against the
Royalist Cavaliers of King Charles I during England’s first Civil War, but he
parted company when Oliver Cromwell attempted to turn the former kingdom into a republican military dictatorship. Lilburne reacted by joining with
others who were accused by their adversaries of leveling laws so that they
were applied equally and without favor. While imprisoned in the Tower of
London, Lilburne became co-author of the third edition of a proposed written constitution for England. Cromwell reacted to Lilburne’s egalitarian
overtures by exiling him from England and jailing him for life upon his
return.
Lilburne was fiercely independent in both political thought and action
which unsettled many in authority as well as his wife Elizabeth, who on one
occasion rescued him from execution (Frasier 1984: 236). In the following
century when Member of Parliament John Wilkes (1725-1787) was brought
into court the magistrate exclaimed: “God bless me! Friend Wilkes, you are
another John.” Wilkes asked if the magistrate was referring to John
Hampden who Wilkes admired. The magistrate replied: “No, John
Lilburne” (Williamson 1974: 67)
Linking Thomas Jefferson with John Lilburne
In his “Democracy” article, Black had linked the ancestry of Lilburne
and his associates with America’s founding documents (1968: 41), and his
claim raises the question as to where Thomas Jefferson fits into the ideological chain? A partial answer had been provided back in 1918 within William
G. Stanard’s article, “Lilburne-Randolph-Jefferson” published by Virginia
Magazine of History and Biography.
Jefferson’s maternal grandfather was Isham Randolph and in 1717 at
Shadwell Parish Church in London he married Jane Lilburne, a first-cousin
descendant of Freeborn John. Isham and Jane had two daughters: one married Peter Jefferson (father of Thomas) who named his Virginia family home
Shadwell. The house burned down in 1770 and it consumed most of
Thomas Jefferson’s original books and papers. The second daughter of
Isham and Jane married Charles Lewis who named a son Charles Lilburne
Lewis. That son married Lucy Jefferson, sister of Thomas and they named
a son Lilburne Lewis. Randolph Jefferson (brother of Thomas and Lucy)
named a son Lilburne Jefferson.
224
In 1790, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter Martha (Patsy) married her second cousin Thomas Mann Randolph and they established their Virginia
home at Edgehill. The house was named after the site of the first major battle in the English Civil Wars during which Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburne
fought (Frasier 1984: 236).
Unfortunately the two Jefferson nephews who carried the Lilburne
name became engaged in a saga resulting in the murder of a slave, which
resulted in the suicide of one and the flight from justice of his companion
(see Merrill 2004). Aside from acknowledging the existence of his nephew
named Lilburne, Thomas Jefferson did not insert any references to his
genealogical and political Lilburne pedigree within post-Shadwell writings.
Obfuscating Lilburne
In 1988, American author Benjamin Hart wrote about Lilburne in his
Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty. While Hart
clearly understood the differences between the Levellers and the Diggers
and did not confuse the two, he nonetheless paved the way to creating a
new religious interpretation of America’s heritage. Yet, by 2007, Hart’s interpretation (which linked the era of John Lilburne to the formation of
America’s founding documents) was severed by U.S. author Michael
Barone in Our First Revolution. Barone leaped over the Lilburne years to
1688-1689 (when Freeborn John and the English republic were both dead
and the restored monarchy of England had been captured by the invasion
of William of Orange during his so-called “Glorious Revolution”). Barone
brushed aside the Levellers and Diggers as being one and the same:
For much of the second half of the twentieth century, academic historians
… have devoted … attention to the events of 1641-60 … that brought to the
fore radicals who could be seen as ancestors of the Marxist revolutionaries of the Twentieth Century (2007: 2).
Using the pretext of suppressing future 9/11 terrorist acts, America’s
inalienable freeborn rights are now being swept away with Cromwellian
force, and Barone’s work seemingly provides academic cover for such political actions, ignoring the libertarian insights of Justices Black, Douglas and
Warren (and, by extension, Lilburne). As a result, their names have become
anathema in an age of “Big Brother” revisionism that pretends past freedoms had never been fought for nor achieved.
225
Note
Lilburne is currently spelt by most contemporary writers with an “e”, but most U.S.
Supreme Court and historical works spell his surname without an “e”.
References
Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46 United States Supreme Court — Appeal from the
Supreme Court of California. No.102. Argued: January 15-16, 1947 — Decided:
June 23, 1947. Dissent: Hugo L. Black (joined by William O. Douglas) (See n.14:
(John Lilburn(e)’s trial 3 Howell’s State Trials 1315; 4 id. 1269, 1280, 1292,
1342.)
Barenblatt v. United States, 360 U.S. 109 Certiorari to the United States Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit No. 35. Argued: November 18, 1958
— Decided: June 8, 1959. Dissent: Hugo L. Black with whom The Chief Justice
and Justice William O, Douglas concur, dissenting (n.b. “The memory of one
of these, John Lilburne …”).
Barone, M. 2007. Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval that
Inspired America’s Founding Fathers. New York: Crown Publishers.
Bernstein, E. 2000 (1930). Cromwell and Communism: Socialism and Democracy in
the Great English Revolution. Translated by H.J. Stenning. Nottingham:
Spokesman Books.
Black, H. L. “Democracy’s heritage: Free thought, free speech, free press”, in Book
of the Year 1968. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., pp. 39-44.
Black, H.L., Elizabeth Black. 1968. Mr. Justice and Mrs. Black, Memoirs. New York:
Random House.
Dillard, I. 1963. One Man’s Stand for Freedom: Mr. Justice Black and the Bill of Rights.
New York: Knopf.
Douglas, W. O. 1954. An Almanac of Liberty. Garden City: Doubleday.
Douglas, W. O. 1980. The Court Years — 1937-1975, Autobiography. New York:
Random House.
England, J. 1992. “Who is John Lilburne? Textbooks don’t tell us” in Startext Ink (Fort
Worth Star Telegram [TX]) January 1992, p. 7.
Frasier, Antonia. 1984. The Weaker Vessel. New York: Knopf.
Gilder, E. 2003. Mass Media Moments in the United Kingdom, the USSR and the USA.
Sibiu: “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu Press.
Grogan, E. 1972. Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps. New York: Little/Brown.
Hart, B. 1988. Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty. Dallas:
Lewis and Stanley.
Hill, C. 1984 (1972). The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the
English Revolution. London: Peregrine (Penguin).
Leonard, M. 1996. “WRLI”, in From International Waters: 60 Years of Offshore
Broadcasting. Heswall: Forest Press, p. 397.
Levy, L L. 1986 (1968). Origins of the Fifth Amendment. New York: Macmillan.
226
Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 United States Supreme Court — Certiorari to the
Supreme Court of Arizona. No 759.Argued: February 28-March 1, 1966 Decided: June 13, 1966. Opinion of the Court: Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Merrill, B., Jr. 2004 (1976). Jefferson’s Nephews: A Frontier Tragedy. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Newman, R. K. 1994. Hugo Black: A Biography. New York: Pantheon.
‘Pirate waves: Texans plan North Sea station despite European limits on radio’
Dallas Times Herald, 8 July, 1985, p.1.
‘Pop und oldies aus der nordsee’ Hörzu (Hamburg) 3 August 1984, Radio-TV section
32/84.
Stanard, W. G. 1918. “Lilburne-Randolph-Jefferson”, in Virginia Magazine of History
and Biography 28, pp 321-324.
‘The strife on the ocean waves’ Broadcast magazine [UK], 23 March 1984, p.52.
Ullmann v. United States, 350 U.S. 422 United States Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit. Number 58, Argued: December 6, 1955 — Decided: March 26, 1956.
Dissent: William O. Douglas) with Hugo L. Black concurring.
Williamson, Audrey. 1974. Wilkes: A Friend To Liberty. New York: E. P. Dutton.
THE MEDIEVAL SOCIAL HIERARCHY:
FROM CONGREGATIO FIDELIUM TO SOCIETAS HUMANA
DANA VASILIU
University of Bucharest
Abstract: The paper looks into the way in which the medieval society was
organized as a vertical disposition of ordines complemented in the thirteenth
century by a horizontal hierarchy of estates which accounted for the proliferation of more and more differentiated human types.
The main current of medieval thought up to the thirteenth century was
predominantly Christian and Neoplatonic. It emphasized the prevailing
belief that the whole created universe follows the plan of God who is at the
apex of a universal hierarchy. Within this pattern of thought, it followed that
God was the founder and the supreme ruler and the organisation of human
society in its entirety was imposed from above, and was to be carried out in
accordance with the revealed will of God. The divine order of the universe
is paralleled by that of divinely ordered Christian society, which has been
given temporal existence but draws its very nature from above. Since the
divine ordering presupposes that human society is orientated heavenwards,
then all the members of the community must observe the principles of right
living as embodied in the Christian faith. Therefore, it is the element of faith
and the constant reliance upon the divine will which determine social
coherence and secure the viability of the human corporation.
Moreover, man’s relationship to the world is further conceived in terms
of vocation and duty, and society is pictured as a huge organism in which
each member is allotted an immutable place and a specific function which
he/she pursues for the sake of the common purpose. The Pauline and
patristic teachings demanding that one should remain in the calling to
which one has been called assume as much a social as a political significance. Only when each member of society acts in his/her divinely commanded function will order and concord (harmonia mundi) be obtained.
Transgression of one’s position in society, liminality or change were viewed
228
as either anarchic or accidental. Society was thus highly static but not inert.
The question of the right relationship of powers, so necessary for the maintenance of the harmonia mundi, became of prime interest in the age.
Within a society founded exclusively upon faith, where each and every individual lives inside the boundaries of this communitas omnium fidelium,
comprising all Christians alike whether members of the laity or of the clergy, and forming one body and “a single polity” (Wilks 1963: 50), a lawful partition of power is essential. In this respect, the appropriate separation of
functions within the community of believers is that between the governors
and the governed, between those who have special qualifications for directing the society and the rest of the Christian body, in other words, between
the ordained and the unordained members of the congregation. Hence, the
organic perception of society held that the Christian body was made up of
two distinct orders, sacerdotal and laity, its spiritual and secular members
which acted together to ensure the good functioning of the organism.
Moreover, as Wilks (1963: 52) has noticed, the division of the two ordines is
analogous to the separation of a man into body and soul meaning that the
ordo clericalis is intrinsically superior and dominates the ordo laicalis:
“Knowledge of the Christian faith became the supreme criterion for government, and since every act had to be a Christian act, that is to say, oriented
by faith, it followed that only those who knew the content of the faith were
entitled to rule, and in so ruling to dominate every aspect of human life.
Direction and government by the sacerdotium becomes inevitable since
they alone can tell what is and what is not Christian.”
This assumption is supported by a passage from Augustine’s De trinitate (available at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1301.htm). The Father
of the early Christian Church believed that corporeal things are arranged in
a hierarchy and are governed by spiritual things, also arranged hierarchically and reaching up to God. The hierarchy of the created Universe and all
hierarchies are ultimately scales of perfection with the higher grades being
inherently nobler, more worthy than the lower ones. Unlike God, who is the
highest, noblest, has no beginning and no end, the angels still immortal entities, differ from God in as much as they were created by Him:
(…) angels... are created by God in eternal and immutable existence.
Unlike God, they have duration, but not the mutable duration measured by
time (Wood 1997: 9).
229
Saint Augustine defined them as God’s retinues, administrators of the
entire universe, and conveyors of the divine will to humankind. A century
later, Gregory the Great believed that man was summoned to occupy the
positions left vacant by fallen angels and laid the foundation of the so called
“angelic anthropology” (Faure 2002: 369). Humans now played a greater
role in the divine plan, not only as subjects for salvation, but as future ministers and angels of God. To achieve this status, they must not only prove
exceptional but also worthy and pleasing in the eyes of God.
Angels were also perceived as epitomes of divinity that ought to be imitated. Even if these heavenly messengers were believed to lack substantiality since they were created exclusively as spiritual entities, whenever represented they were attributed an implicit corporeal dimension. This may be
interpreted in the light of the 1025 dictum: pictura est laicorum litteratura. In
an age of illiteracy, when visual representations functioned as the most
important means of education and knowledge, the charismatic ‘body’ of the
angel was conveyor of divine grace: “physical presence is accordingly the
anchor of charismatic culture” and “the irreplaceable centre of the cult of
charisma is the body” (Jaeger 1994: 8). Moreover, an angel needs a ‘body’
not only to be seen in a superfluous manner, but due to the deficiency of
created matter in apprehending the invisible, the image of the Form
expressed in Matter — to use a Platonic terminology — can be appreciated
and acknowledged as making the Form only when similar to what is known
and hence, identifiable from previous knowledge. Thus, the representations
of angels as anthropo- or zoomorphic instead of ‘unbodied’ intelligence are
necessary due to human shortcomings in conceptual contemplation. Even
more, the depictions of angels through symbols, apart from being mere
poetic imagery, are designed to appeal to the human mind. Using both similar and dissimilar symbolism, knowledge can thus be made available so as
to uplift man with the help of those things he can understand.
Within the frames of a charismatic culture which stressed the importance of the body and of the real presence as mediators of cultural and theological values and which ascribed imitation the basic if not the most efficient mode of defining oneself ad imaginem Dei, the monastic ideal was
perceived as the utmost form of living in the ‘body’ and the steadiest path
one should tread in order to reach God. Among the community of believers,
monks were said to imitate angels’ charisma to the full It was through physical restraint, contemplation and continuous prayer that monks could reach
230
the celestial choirs of the angels. Moreover, the spiritual path of purification,
illumination, and theosis (deification) and the subsequent virtues of humility, asceticism, selflessness, and loving compassion contributed to the crystallization of a special kind of ethical consciousness at the level of society,
which Lanzetta (2003: 35) calls: an “ethics of perfection”. Born out of constant prayer and reflection on divinity, this ethics compelled the monk to
participate in and imitate the qualities of being that were best revealed in
the life of Jesus. Hence, imitation and participation in Christ’s divinity represented the foundation of moral perfection, for it was only through the development of selflessness and ardour for God that one could become deified,
divine-like. And the promise of St. Athanasius (De Incarnatione 54, available
at http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/history/ath-inc.htm): “God became man
so that man might become God”, served as impetus for the spiritual quest.
As regards their social function, monks were supposed to act as mediators between God and humanity. While primarily focused on the inner life
of prayer and virtue, monks were exhorted to practise perfection in order to
mirror the divine in the world and elevate man to a God-like state. Evagrius
Ponticus (Lanzetta 2003: 47) believed that:
It is part of justice that you [monks] should pray not only for your own
purification but also for that of every man. In doing so you will imitate the
practice of the angels.
At this point, one cannot help but acknowledge the intimate bond
which linked monastic life and secular culture, a bond which exceeded its
solely spiritual limits and eventually led to the crisis of spirituality which
shook western Christianity between the eleventh and the late thirteenth
centuries:
Although monastic writers promoted a highly sacralized world view,
monastic centres were actively involved in the training of theologians,
administrators, and missionaries who served not only in the church but
also in the courts and places of secular rulers. Monasteries also established charitable institutions which served a number of purposes: care of
the sick, distribution of food and clothing to the needy, shelter for pilgrims
and travellers. In addition, tax systems, juridical structures, and execution
of legal decisions were often administered by the monks (Torvend 1983:
118).
231
Therefore, monks functioned not only as intercessors between
mankind and divinity, but also between the central and the marginal social
segments. Their role within the social organism resembled that of ‘blood’,
nurturing and oxygenating all the cells of the ‘body’, a vital liaison for securing life to the organism.
Monks’ elitist mentality and their claim to social hegemony implied
that secular society was undervalued to the point of total submission. The
hierarchical scheme of the three ordines introduced by the ecclesiastical
culture of the Carolingian tradition that divided society into oratores (those
who pray), bellatores (those who fight), and laboratores (those who work)
was revised in monastic circles to assign monks an exclusive, topline position:
Among Christians of the two sexes we know well that there exist three
orders and, so to speak, three levels. The first is that of the laity, the second that of the clergy, and the third that of the monks. Although none of
the three is exempt from sin, the first is good, the second is better, and the
third is excellent (Miccoli 1990: 53-54).
The lay power is thus effectively excluded from any major share in the
direction and government of the congregatio fidelium. It was this conception of a corporeal society acting as a single political nucleus, unum corpus
and corpus Christi and being rightfully led by the sacerdotal orders that provided the basis on which the entire hierocratic system rested. The hierocratic doctrine stipulated that the spiritual ruler, i.e. the pope, had both swords
but gave the use of the temporal sword (not the temporal sword itself) to
the lay ruler to exercise authority on his behalf. The secular ruler in this conceptualization of the medieval society was then simply an agent, an instrument through which the pope (at this point it is worth mentioning that all
popes in the decisive half century of the struggle for reform from Gregory
VII to Calixtus II had a monastic background, except for the last) implemented the programme of government which he had devised and authorised.
Conversely, the anti-hierocratic thesis claimed that Christ himself had given
one sword, the spiritual, to the pope and the other, the temporal to the secular ruler, emperor or king. Even the further acknowledgement of two distinct species of authority could hardly hope to place in the pope’s spiritual
subordination the temporal, transient authority of the secular ruler. Hence,
both in the High and Late Middle Ages incompatible versions of universal
order supplemented by the growth of papacy as the dominant force in
232
Western society brought about division, incessant negotiation and clash of
interests among spiritual and secular rulers (popes, kings, emperors, and
bishops).
During the thirteenth century, the rediscovery of Aristotle and the
advent of a pagan, materialistic conception of the universe, allowed for an
alternative non-Christian system of thought to develop. In direct opposition
to Christian beliefs, this new system stated the supremacy of the material
over the spiritual, since matter was held to have existed before the creation
of the world. According to Aristotelian standards, the whole conception of a
divinely ordained universe, even the theory of creation, became doubtful.
Frictions generated by these subversive beliefs culminated in one of the
greatest conflicts during the High Middle Ages (c. 1050-1250): the struggle
between ‘old’ and ‘new’ theologies — or ‘monastic’ vs. ‘scholastic’ theologies — a conflict in which logic played a key role.
Starting with the flourishing of anti-hierocratic doctrines in the
eleventh century, this dual ideology reached its heights once Aristotelian
teachings were employed. The ‘new’ school of thought tried to deprive the
concept of Church of its earthly connection and maintain only its spiritual
counterpart. Next to the Church, a mere mystical body with no political substance, there was another society or body politic which was autonomous,
self-sufficient and independent. This was the human union, societas
humana, the State, “a natural product with its natural propensities, natural
aims and ends” (Ullmann 1988: 19). Society was no longer envisaged as a
congregation of Christians: congregatio fidelium and corpus Christi but consisting of nothing else than human beings or ‘natural’ men; homo and not
christianus becomes the leading feature within this new pattern of thought.
Thereby, a new and better articulated dualism emerged. It was no longer
the concept of faith that ensured homogeneity and endurance to an exclusively vocational society; natural man became its determinative principle
and for the Christian there remained hardly any room. Moreover, within a
purely mystical body, a purely spiritual entity allotted a limited sphere of
authority, there was no need for papacy, at least not in the way it was conceptualized before. The pope and his bishops had nothing but spiritual
authority, the power to give directions in matters of faith, as for those
entrusted with political authority, lay rulers no longer needed either papal
endorsement regarding their actions or any divine functional qualification at
all. Now it was the lay ruler, not the pope or the bishops, who acted as
233
immediate source of power and the only true law was human law and not
divine commandment. Consequently, the papal claim on supremacy over
both religious and secular society (plenitudo potestatis) was perceived as
incongruous. The officers of the Church, and hence the pope, were entitled
only to give counsel or exhort and no longer decree or enforce their decrees
so as to produce results in the social life of the State. The supporters of the
anti-hierocratic doctrine could finally rejoice in the resounding victory of
Aristotelianism over theology and politics.
If the concept of an indivisible Christian society, acting as one single
body politic was gradually superseded by the belief within the existence of
a society of individuals (humana universitas) acting together in pursuit of
general happiness and well-being, other co-substantial, related concepts
were reversed too. First of all, this highly individualistic doctrine, in stark
contrast to the hierocratic view, no longer sanctioned the univocal discourse of the Church as the only reliable message-producer, but valued a
polyphonic discourse whose keynotes resided in the harmonization of
many individual voices, a gradual progression from dissonance to consonance. To the self-assertive, dogmatic, insular and retrograde discourse of
the sacerdotium, the ‘new’ theology opposed a militant, open, incentive,
and multivocal sequence. However, it must not be imagined that there was
a sudden destruction of the papal-sacerdotal-hierocratic edifice. Nor can it
be said that the Christian ideal of conduct was abandoned in favour of a
pagan, hedonistic approach of Averro-Aristotelian ancestry. In spite of the
thoroughly secular ideals propounded by the ‘new’ scholars, they were
unable to totally overcome the strongholds of their faithful opponents. The
two systems of thought were functioning as alternative terms, complementary rather than mutually exclusive.
Secondly, the overemphasis laid on observation, on empirical and
inductive methods of reasoning changed the premises of knowledge that
was no longer divinely bestowed (passive) but tenaciously acquired
(active). Monasteries themselves were no longer perceived as the only
repositories of the truth and sole centres of education. As a response to the
monopoly exercised by secerdotium over instruction, independent secular
schools emerged and later evolved into the institution of the university. The
system of education based on personal authority and cultus virtutum taught
within the milieu of cathedral or monastic schools was considerably altered
to mirror the shift that occurred in the course of the late twelfth and early
234
thirteenth centuries toward rational inquiry, debate and systematic critical
thought.
At the same time, the growth of a new social segment the ‘middleclass’, whether urban burgesses or country gentry, wealthy enough to begin
to have a say in the otherwise monovocal utterance of the Age hints at the
democratisation of the discourse that allows for more than one voice to be
heard. The alteration of the social life is not accidental and has its own
impact on (against) the feudal system as a whole. The emerging money
economy dramatically changed the status of aristocracy, whether lay or
ecclesiastical. Starting with the thirteenth century, a power-centred opposition potens/paupers was being replaced by the binary rich/poor, a new
dichotomy that reflected “the progress of a monetary economy and the promotion of wealth as the source or consequence of power” (Le Goff 1990:
29). Furthermore, the social hierarchic system, which relied heavily on the
vertical disposition of ordines, was complemented by “a horizontal hierarchy of estates” and “with the thirteenth century, when society became
more complex, estates proliferated, [and] human types became more differentiated” (Le Goff 1990: 34). This change was also encouraged by a rapid
urban development which reached its apogee in the thirteenth century. And
it was within the urban milieu that the new found bourgeoisie:
(…) toppled down the feudal, hierarchic system and established a new
egalitarian order, or better, a horizontal rather than a vertical hierarchy (…)
while the urban area became a space of exercising one’s liberty, or better,
of one’s ‘franchises’ and liberties (Le Goff 2002: 56).
The new emphasis lay on money and easy-transferable benefits
enlarged access of the low social strata to instances of power and decision.
With the proliferation of new social roles and increasing social mobility, the divine message was leaving the consecrated space of the church or
monastery to accompany the faithful on the roads of their worldly tribulations: ministerium verbi inter gentes (‘the ministry of the word among the
people’). At the same time, the religious discourse was bound to adjust to
an ever changing reality whose sole immutable reference remained Christ.
Thus, as early as the thirteenth century, the most dynamic segments of the
spiritual arm, the friars, were moving from city to city, practising extreme
poverty and urging a more and more diversified population ‘to follow naked
the naked Christ’ (sequela Christi). I believe that this gradual shift from
obscurity to visibility and finally transparency illustrates both the dilution of
235
monastic spirituality in the Late Middle Ages and the attempts to regain the
fullness of grace attributed to the early centuries of Christianity. Through the
pursuit of vita apostolica popular movements offered an alternative to the
traditional dependency of laity upon a contaminated religious segment who
suffered greatly from its participation in the earthly affairs. Those aspects of
Christian life that had been cherished in the monastic environment: fraternal charity, study of Scripture, voluntary poverty, active proclamation of faith
were now promoted in the secular world and openly acclaimed by large
crowds of worshippers gathered in the marketplace to listen to the preachers. The identification of vita christiana with vita monastica crumbled as
western European culture moved from “the stability of vassalage and
monastic religion” (Torvend 1983: 121) to the openness and polysemy of lay
spirituality, from the obscurity of the cloister to the radiance of the world.
All in all, medieval man was obsessed with the idea of order, discipline, hierarchy. Nothing was randomized. Everything was systematically
conceived as part of an ontological hierarchy starting from God, the
absolute being in absolute perfection down to the composite world of substance and spirit and ending in formless matter which had the lowest
degree of being and perfection. Thus, human society was perceived as a
faithful replica of the divine and its history a linear progress from the time of
Creation to the Last Judgment. The social structure was itself fully integrated within the divine scheme. Monks and ecclesiastics formed the spiritual
arm; their joint function was to intercede for humanity and ensure its spiritual salvation. In return, the secular arm, knights and nobles, was supposed
to protect the sacred from the perilous attacks of the infidel and the heretic.
It was a collective effort inspired by divine love and human responsiveness,
a collaborative working of the secular and spiritual (religious) powers to
thwart the pernicious intrigues of the devil who envied the harmony of the
world. Even if the rediscovery of Aristotle in the thirteenth century brought
about a change in the conceptualization of medieval society, the shift from
congregatio fidelium to societas humana did not aim at supplanting the former type of social organization with the latter but at offering a complementary solution to an otherwise unbalanced system of thought in which religion exercised an ideological monopoly over society.
236
References
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history/ath-inc.htm [2007, June 27].
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[2007, June 27].
Faure, P. 2002. “Îngerii”, in Dicþionar tematic al evului mediu occidental. Le Goff,
Jacques; Schmitt, Jean-Claude (eds.). Iaºi: Polirom, pp.367-375.
Jaeger, C. S. 1994. The Envy of Angels; Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in
Medieval Europe, 950-1200. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lanzetta, Beverly J. 2003. “Contemplative Ethics: Intimacy, Amor Mundi and
Dignification in Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich”. Paper presented at
Princeton University at the Religion, Mysticism, and Ethics: An Interdisciplinary
Colloquium on the Moral Implications of Mysticism in the World’s Religions
[May 17, 2003].
Le Goff, J. (ed.). 1990. The Medieval World. London: Parkgate Books.
Le Goff, J., Schmitt, J.-C. (eds.). 2002. Dicþionar tematic al evului mediu occidental.
Iaºi: Polirom.
Miccoli, G. 1990. “Monks”, in The Medieval World. Jacques Le Goff (ed.). London:
Parkgate Books, pp. 50-73.
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Available: http://www.spiritualitytoday.org/spir2day/ 833522torvend.html.
[2006, May 27].
Ullmann, W. 1988. “The Medieval Papacy, St. Thomas and Beyond”, in Law and
Jurisdiction in the Middle Ages. George Garnett (ed.). Ashgate: Variorum, pp. 131.
Wilks, M. 1963. The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge:
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of Plato”, in Néoplatonism et Philosophie Médiévale. Brepols.
THE END OF THE JOURNEY: BACK TO SCOTLAND
MAGDA DANCIU
University of Oradea
Abstract: The paper discusses those elements of national identity that persist
and eventually shape one’s wishes within circumstances of accidental or deliberate exile. The more general considerations are illustrated by a closer look at
James Kelman’s latest book, You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free,
and Andrew O’Hagan’s first novel Our Fathers.
A closer examination of contemporary Scottish fiction will show how
the old patterned constructions of the last three decades are being reconfigured and rejuvenated: fictional styles and narrative strategies are expanded and reshaped in the general attempt to cope with the new status of the
country (an independent Parliment) and the new international situation
(globalization, holistic inclusion etc.). The revival of the Scottish fiction in
the 1980s was heralded as a long expected change and demonstration of
creative potential and of a consistent maturity in “confronting and highlighting urgent sociocultural and aesthetic issues” (Wallace 1993: 2) by foregrounding cultural identity in its most complex representation.
Towards writing the Scottish
The most important concern at that initial stage of artistic rebirth
seems to have been finding the way to reconcile and juxtapose, adapt and
challenge, traditional views with new visions in a heteroglossic dialogical
combination between inheritances of the past and pressures of the presentday generations. Its outcome is a kind of fiction that allows the reassessment of the value of myths and folk tales within the long history of storytelling tradition preserved throughout centuries by the inhabitants of these
ambiguous landscapes of mystery and legends. Good illustrations in this
respect are the novels of George Mackay Brown or Shena Mackay.
Most novelists show awareness of the Scottish archaic asset and of the
need to revaluate it within a larger context of experiment and innovation
238
and are delighted to use Scottish material in a Scottish setting to work with
general issues of postmodern inventiveness. It is the case of Alasdair Gray’s
or Janice Galloway’s books in which the concept of the Caledonian antisyzygy is re-processed in new versions of the classical fantasy of the divided self introduced by James Hogg in his The Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and by Robert Louis Stevenson’s
book‚ The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the two seminal
texts that represent an overall pattern of rational/objective experience set
against supernatural/subjective experience, the conflicting coexistence of
good and evil, eventually a celebration of the multiplicity of the self in
which “the person is simply a spectator and a social function” (Craig 1999:
114). The parodical and ironic reworking of the split self in the effort to
question and answer the issue regarding the nature of identity, both social
and cultural, foregrounds the inconsistency of the dominant discourse and
demystifies the master codes in terms of postmodernism when pointing out
that a unitary self is an impossible and dangerous illusion, especially in a
country whose political and cultural history pinpoints the traditional doubleness and ambiguity of a history-less, marginalized nation.
Postmodern decentredness and the urge for valuing small narratives
and the regional versus the global favour the Scottish writers’ constant
search for ways of asserting Scottishness. This is clearly rendered in the
books of the Glasgow novelists, or those of Ron Butlin and Brian McCabe,
whose dealing with problems of language, class, politics is an attempt to
negotiate “the space between centres and margins in ways that… challenge
any monolithic culture” (Hutcheon 1988: 198). The Scottish identity finds at
least two ways of featuring, that is, in terms of
a) language or narrative voice which is seen by most writers as the
basis of the narrator’s search to define a different subjectivity and to
thematize this difference as an ex-centricity emerging from “contextualization or positioning in relation to plural others” (Hutcheon
1988: 67). This is usually achieved by employing a Scottish speech
and syntax in the dialectal space of the novel, thus challenging the
standard English uniformity when conveying the actual texture of
the life of ordinary people, who inhabit a fragmented linguistic community;
b) the setting selection, which ranges from denuded villages in the
Orkney islands (George Mackay Brown) to Edinburgh’s “order and
239
elegance of the Scottish Enlightenment” (Daiches 1993: 86) and to
Glasgow, “the magnificent city” (Gray 1981: 243) — an environment
that best renders the apparent blankness of Scottish life, the sense
of deprivation of a country that has “nationhood without statehood”
(Morgan 1993: 86).
Now, about thirty years after the visible impetus of the Scottish fiction,
one might ascertain that new changes are occurring on the domestic stage,
changes meant to make peripheral Scottish voice and the Scottish dark land
and its tradition a challenge for the future. These changes are embodied in
the emergence of a generation of Scottish novelists who re-configure the
present state of the novel by their contribution that comes from two
sources:
• they came to live in Scotland and brought their personal and national heritage, thus enriching the creative potential and diversifying the
local narrative voices by adding new tones to the plurality that has
become common in most parts of Scotland nowadays (see the case
of Regi Claire, a writer of Swiss origin who imbues her texts with the
flavour of the Old Continent);
• they leave Scotland for a while and their exile becomes the very
essence of their texts, which turn into places where they negotiate
the identity and cultural challenges they encounter abroad (as in
case of Alexander McCall Smith whose Botswana has traces of
Caledonian education and culture).
The present paper examines the latter situation, which either the writers themselves or their characters go through as part of a process of cultural multiplication meant to salvage the previously damaged identity of a
nation whose historical and cultural dimensions are permanently rediscovered and recombined as an attempt to escape the submissive picture that
it was originally patterned on.
Caledonian identity
Identity in Scotland — especially in Glasgow, which represents a sort
of radical aspect of national features — becomes a symptom of a deracinated nation emerging from “spiritual homelessness, as well as from the opinions and perspectives of a minority within a broadly-defined society” (Dunn
1993:156) and validating the Caledonian historical, cultural, ethical experience by exposing problems/tensions of language, class, politics and religion
240
that resulted from accumulated historical wrongs. “The Scottish nation
exists insofar as many Scots believe that it exists”, claims Calder (1994: 52),
consequently its writers feel bound to search to define this peculiar subjectivity and ethos, to focus on this difference and to position it in relation to
others, to reconstruct tradition and history, and to grant Scotland cultural
independence.
Representation and acknowledgement of Scottishness remain permanent issues for novelists today. They are fully engaged in foregrounding the
creative potential of the country and eager to answer, in individualized
ways, the question that Kate Atkinson postulates in her book Behind the
Scene at the Museum (1995: 252): “What is Scotland? What is Scotland? Is it
rain solidified into shapes of houses and hills? Is it mist, carved into roadside cafes with names like crofter’s kitchen? Who knows?”
The promotion of the Scottish image and the Scottish imagination consists of a kaleidoscopic combination of authentic subjects and genuine,
inherited treasures represented by national symbols like Highland, thistle,
heather, tartans, Whisky Fudge, Soor Plums, kilt, pipe, pubs, against domestic sceneries such as Edinburgh and its rock, its castle, its festivals, its hills;
the Scottish lochs “trying to suck people into an endless blackness”
(Atkinson 1995: 258) with its mysteries and legends; or magnificent
Glasgow, so ”distinct from other places” (McIlvanney 1987: 129), apparently embodying the Scottish spirit and history in terms of industrial conquest
and the resistance to this phenomenon.
The Glasgow novel emphasized the relevance, the pride and the burden of the Glaswegian identity when its representatives — Alasdair Gray,
William McIlvaney, James Kelman — referred to its imagined community as
emerging and being closely related to the state of the town, originally a big
city with an impressive architecture, submitted to many changes for the last
three decades as a result of capitalist
industrial development.
Consequently, Glasgow has become “the sort of industrial city where most
people live nowadays but nobody imagines living” (Gray 1981:105), a place
where “hope is scarce and dread is full” (McIlvanney 1977: 27), a zone that
becomes the site of challenging events that cave everlasting memories.
The Exiles, or the ”Geography of Identity”
A Scot is said to be “someone living in the area which comes under
Scots law, so long as that person also supports Scottish athletes against
241
those of other countries or identifies strongly with some other aspect of
Scottish culture — our folk-music say. A Scot abroad is anyone who still fulfils the latter condition.” (Calder 1994: 52). James Kelman’s main character
in You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free (2004), Jeremiah Brown,
a ’Skarrisch’, epitomizes the condition of a Scot, more precisely, a
Glaswegian Scot, living in exile in the United States of ‘Uhmerika’, a country
whose history differs so much from his own and where his great-greatgreat-granddaddy once passed along. His life comes to a critical moment
when he decides to return to his motherland, “sunny Skallin”, where there
is a chance “’ye bump into one of yer ancestors, descendants, a long-lost
cousin. What ye hope to discover is if ye are related to a clan chieftain, if ye
are descended from royal blood and maybe own a mountain or something,
if ye have any cheap servants at your disposal, with luck they’ll be wearing
a kilt and sing praise songs for yer wife and family” (Kelman 2004: 13).
The difference aforementioned is the possible cause of his marginalization in a society that is essentially made up of differences, a paradox that
does not help in understanding his doing “the wrong thing” in terms of religion, race, class, nationality
Some might argue that a Celtic male with pink skin, fair hair (receding)
and blue eyes (watery) should have been empowered to travel the world
where ere he chose and dinae need no colour-coded federal authorization
never mind the okay from stray true-born persons he met in bars. How can
Aryans be Aliens ?... It is a contradiction. This feller’s physicality and language are passport and visa. And then add to the tally that I was an ex
Security operative, how Uhmerkin can ye get! (Kelman 2004: 20)
His failure to adjust and be accepted by the new country emphasises
the persistence of those features that reflect one’s national affiliation and
make the adoption of a new one impossible. He tries to quench his loneliness by drinking whisky in bars in a desperate need of a pub conversation
and atmosphere: “lonely man is to go hame, lonely man enters bar, lonely
man has a drink, lonely man has another drink; lonely man ponders a third
drink; lonely man has that third drink; lonely man mulls over his present in
terms of his past, then blows out his fucking brains” (Kelman 2004: 91).
His loneliness might have been induced by a self-centred environment, by a mutilated perception of the Other, and, generally, by a cultural
difference negatively or neutrally recorded: “a non-assimilatit alien,
Jeremiah Brown, nothing to worry about, Class III Redneck Card carrier,
242
aryan, caucasian, atheist, born loser, keeps nose clean, big debts, nay
brains, big heid” (Kelman 2004: 106).
After twelve years of living in the States, Jeremiah still enjoys spending
time playing cards — “sentimental shite” — and betting in his own way: “I
was a hopeless gambler and I don’t mean somebody whose bets were goddam useless (...) [suh as] betting a drink to Boeing 73 if a star is going to fall
out the sky”[...] “A side of my so-called intellect knew I must lose these bets
so I gamble the opposite” (Kelman 2004: 114, 228). This makes him an
incomprehensible partner, a ’no-gooder neer-do-well’(316) as a co-worker
at Airport Security Service, a non-integrated citizen because “I didnay know
how to do it properly, how to be it properly, be a human being” (120) […]
“I’m an alien furnir, bastard John, the only card I got is a red Card, it’s Class
III (…), registered fucking non-integratit with the wrong fucking politics, the
wrong philosophy of life man, the wrong this and the wrong that. The red
Card is a marked card. If I aint got cash in hand I aint got cash. That is how
it is. All I have is money. Or else no money. I can go into a bank and gie in
my dough or else I can take it out, but that’s that” (144).
Through all this he learns the lesson of deracination, an experience
through which he creates his own imaginary homeland in a parallel time
and space, a place he wants to go back to in order to see his mother but to
which he is only genetically and genealogically connected, as his present
life — Indian spouse, daughter, responsibilities, commitments — is in the
States where people have little or no knowledge of his painful origin: “The
idea of staying in Skallin Christ was unthinkable. Years ago my maw sent the
occasional newspaper so I could keep in touch but later that was that, and
ye never heard any news at all about the ol bonne place. If it wasnay for
early morning screenings of Braveheart and Graveyard Bobby and the other
yin where the ghostly wee town comes out the mist every hunner years
then that would be that. In my last job the immediate superior was another
of them that think Skallin is a wee town somewhere mainland Europe, perhaps to the ‘left side’ of Poland” (325).
Jeremiah also experiences a status of otherness through his match
with Yasmina, a product of post-colonialism, a condition close to discrimination and marginalization which he feels quite familiar with, when considering the long history of his nation of sharing duplicity of mind and language, a schizophrenia dating back to the times of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
persisting in the collective memory and profile: “the concept schizophrenia,
243
there is definitely an aspect of one’s personality, of my personality, an aspect
that caves in for no one” (131). […] “We were known for wur paranoic tendencies and were constantly dealing with grounds for paranoia personally,
or else we fucking suffered paranoia, to whatever extent. Try sticking a kilt
and a turban and walking into yer average sports bar. Nay wonder we al sit
talking to wurselves” (336).
He expresses his individuality by using a demotic dialectal language,
rendered by an odd spelling that can typographically suggest the vernacular
spectacular, echoing a community that is trying to make itself seen and
heard: “My name is Jerry. I’m from Skallin, I’m flyin hame tomorrow and I’m
just here for a couple of beers, well, and this wee uisghe… I havenay been
hame for a long time.[…] You Skarrisch folk, yous are of the auld persuasion.[…] the brrisch monarcquy … we must consolidate the friendship
between baith wur nations, bearing in mind wur respective histories.[…] Ye
cannay go hame with nothing. I’ve never met naybody yet who went hame
with nothing, if we dont take something hame Christ then what’s the point
of gaun hame ? ye wouldnay want to go hame. No me anyway. […]This is
Uhmerka, land of the free, ifn ya didn’t notice; home from home for the dispossessed, the enslaved, the poor unfortunates; this is everybody’s goddam
country” (393, 407).
Highlander, or the Geology of Identity
The legend/myth of Highlander, the time traveller, the symbol of innocence and justice, combines natural settings with supernatural happenings
and renders the spatial and time eternity of the Scottish spirit, history, culture, foregrounding the constant features that make up Scottish identity, as
well as the image, the fame and the reputation of the country and its people. James Bawn, Andrew O’Hagan’s protagonist in Our Fathers (1999),
embodies the identity heritage passed along four generations. He is the last
link of his genealogical chain, empowered to tell the story of how strongly
rooted his Glaswegian origin was, how well preserved their family and
national traits were, in spite of the hardships and deterioration they were
submitted to throughout the centuries.
James Bawn is the offspring of a split family dominated by the figure of
a father who has repeatedly failed to be a hero for his son. Most of their life
together has been imbued with paternal hatred, violence, and aggression,
an inescapable burden of the past, which he seems to be doomed to carry
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on: “In my father’s anger there was something of the nation (...) His was a
country of fearful men, proud in the talking, paltry in the living, and every
promise another lie. My father bore all that dread that came with the soil —
unable to rise, or rise again, and slow to see power in his own hands. They
were sick at heart, weak in the bones. All they wanted was the peace of
defeat. They couldn’t live in this world. They couldn’t stand where they
were. (...) he was one of his own kind, bred, with long songs of courage,
never to show a courageous hand” (O’Hagan 1999: 8).
The image that is left after Robert Bawn’s death recalls another
Robert’s (Burns) fame and genius-like acknowledgment:
An alcoholic, the kind that rages and mourns.
He never meant well, and he never did well.
And yet he found himself trying.
(O’Hagan 1999: 228)
The mental trip deep inside the self, rather than the physical journey to
the original places and times that shaped the generations of Bawn males,
points to the way most men in Scotland are, that is, angry, hateful, aggressive, frustrated, lonely, sinful, sad, poor: “The world of my father was a thing
to be hated (...) that’s why he drank.(...) With can and bottle he fought the
good fight, and kept himself from himself again” (10) [...] “He was generous
in the pub; he believed in that sort of kindness, where near-anonymous
men could think him free, and think him great[...] his people were always
very heavily into politics and that” (24). The legacy of the past is passed on
to each generation to come, to be memorized and to be reiterated, as
Jamie himself feels bound to do as the last survivor of the Bawns’ dynasty:
“Our fathers were made for grief. I could see it now. And all our lives we
waited for sadness to happen. Their days were trapped in a golden shag
box. Those Scottish fathers! (...) And how they lived in the dark for us now
(...) And where were our fathers? We had run from them. We had run and
run. My life had been miles and miles away [...] Out there, in the dark
places, men and women died for Melville and Knox, and the ground was
sewn with beliefs. And now it seemed but whispering grass. The old stories
gone (...) Those fields of blood and carbon. They became the sites for the
newer wars, our battles for houses and redevelopment (...) The names of
the dead warriors Wallace and Eglinton, Maxton and Hardie, were known
as streets on the council estates, the former glories of Androssan and
Salcoats” (59).
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O’Hagan’s text reflects on a state of mind of a community and a place
that point to experience marked by cultural dislocation, familial displacement, historic isolation and peculiarity, to nostalgia for former landscapes
and traditions: “It’s a place to be built (...) You begin by building it with your
own hands in your own minds, in your own hearts. Our fathers wore themselves away to make this true. That is the history of this century, and of others before us, going back to the Industrial revolution, and further. And it
must remain with us (...). The work of our fathers might give us hope” (29).
The two books reveal the two writers’ concern for the Scottish heritage, its preservation, its future. The question that one is left with is whether
these issues have become stereotypes, whether there is any irony in tackling Scottishness in this millennium, or whether this is the right way to think
of and treasure the past, whether there is a strong belief in the values of a
nation or community.
References
Atkinson, Kate. 1995. Behind the Scenes at the Museum. London: Black Swan.
Calder, A. 1994. Revolving Culture. Notes fron the Scottish Republic. London:
I.B.Tauris Publishers.
Craig, C. 1999. The Modern Scottish Novel. Narrative and the National Imagination.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Daiches, D. (ed.) 1993. The New Companion to Scottish Culture. Edinburgh: Polygon.
Dunn, D. 1993. “Divergent Scottishness”, in The Scottish Novel since the Seventies.
Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson (eds). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Gray, A. 1981. Lanark: A Life in Four Books. London: Picador.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction.
London: Routledge.
Kelman, J. 2004. You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
McIlvanney, W. 1977. Laidlaw. London: Sceptre.
McIlvanney, W. 1987. The Big Man. London: Sceptre.
Morgan, E. 1993. “Tradition and Experiment in the Glasgow Novel”, in The Scottish
Novel since the Seventies. Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson (eds).
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
O’Hagan, A. 1999. Our Fathers. London: Faber and Faber.
Wallace, G. 1993. “Introduction” to The Scottish Novel since the Seventies. Gavin
Wallace and Randall Stevenson (eds). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES: ROMANIA AND EUROPEAN
VALUES IN OFFICIAL VS. FORUM DISCOURSES
IRINA DIANA MÃDROANE
Abstract: The paper sets out first to identify the EU values present in the
discourse of Romanian politicians and of Romanian citizens and, second, to
establish which patterns of legitimising a transnational, European identity are
specific to the two types of discourse. For this purpose, it examines the
dialogicality and meaning relations of the texts selected for analysis.
Prior to 1 January, 2007, Romania was subject to radical reform and
transformation on a social, economic, political and cultural level. The
rescaling of Romania is, however, an ongoing process, requiring great sacrifices from the population. In order to motivate the citizens, politicians
resort to the projection of a common ideal in which all the Romanians may
take pride: the development of a European identity, to be added to the centuries-old Romanian one. The phenomenon is specific to all EU states, but
may increase in intensity in the new member states, which have been
through long-running campaigns that familiarize them with the European
dream. But, ultimately, what does the label “European identity” stand for?
What makes it a justifiable goal for so many people?
The present paper attempts to reveal tendencies in the discourse of
Romanian politicians, on the one hand, and in the forum discourses of concerned citizens, on the other, in relation to European values and identity. It
has three parts: an introduction into the theories about European identity, a
brief presentation of the analytical framework, and two mini-case studies.
1. European Identity
The European identity, as a supra- or transnational identity, is the result
of the activity and policies of European institutions, within the frame of
cross-state cooperation, which is why it is widely assumed by political elites
(especially those working for the EU) and not so much by the ordinary citizens of the EU (Laffan 2004, Wodak 2004, Bruter 2004, Meinhof 2004). The
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Europeanization of the identities of EU member states is an elite-driven project, just like the creation of the Union. In other words, the European institutions have issued policies and treaties in order to lay the foundations of a
common identity which is needed to gain the support and trust of European
citizens (Herrmann and Brewer 2004: 10). At the same time, the initiators of
this process want to reassure all the member states that their national identities are not endangered in any way by the new ‘overarching’ construction;
this has determined them to come up with the motto ‘Unity in diversity’ and
to propose a core of mainly civic and political European values, instead of
cultural ones. But how are the social identities of so many different nations
to acquire the desired European dimension?
Social identities reflect ‘shared representations of a collective self’
(Herrmann and Brewer 2004: 6). There are three aspects of the representation of persons in groups: ‘Who is us?’ (the members of the in-group and the
boundaries of the in-group, i.e. ‘the composition of group identity’), ‘What
are we?’ (characteristics, symbols and values, i.e. ‘the content of group identity’) and ‘the relationship between the in-group and out-groups within a
structured network of social groups’ (Herrmann and Brewer 2004: 6, original emphases). Social identities gain political significance once a relationship is established between these three aspects and the right of a state to
sovereignty. It is the aim of European institutions to harmonise the ‘who’
and ‘what’ of national social identities with the EU membership and values;
otherwise they might encounter problems on their way to common political and economic projects.
It is a general truth in social sciences nowadays that people have multiple identities, since they belong to multiple groups. Herrmann and Brewer
present three systems of such multiple loyalties: (1) nested identities: the
concentric circles pattern — local — regional — national — European identity, subsumed to each other in this order, with the European identity last in
line; this model is revealed in Eurobarometer opinion surveys, due to the
manner in which the questions are conceived by their authors; (2) crosscutting identities: ‘some, but not all, members of one identity group are also
members of another identity group and so on’ (for instance, only some of
the members of a nation may consider themselves European etc.); (3) separate identities: the person belongs to distinct groups, which are kept that
way (Herrmann and Brewer 2004: 8). Risse (2004) adds a fourth: (4) the
marble cake model of multiple identities — ‘the various components of an
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individual’s identity cannot be neatly separated on different levels,’ they are
blended or enmeshed in each other (Risse 2004: 251-252). The configurations of identities which best suit the concept of transnationalism are (1)
and (4), the nested model leading to a rather supranational identity, while
(4) ties in more with transnationalism.
The European institutions may influence identities in two main ways:
by means of socialization (hence, socialization models) and of persuasion
(persuasion models) (Herrmann and Brewer 2004). Socialization refers to
the individuals’ experience with the institutions and their policies, as well as
to the perceived advantages/opportunities offered by them, which would
explain why Brussels elites are more willing to take on a European identity,
while ordinary people show less empathy towards European values and
policies, and sometimes may even feel threatened by them (due to the
intervention of politicians of nationalist orientation or to certain representations in the media). The persuasion models, on the other hand, transform
the institutions into ‘active agents of change’. Thus, one may talk about a
deliberate process aimed at gaining people over to the concept of a common European identity, which is then supposed to contribute to the legitimation of the rules and regulations set by the European institutions, sometimes against the domestic rules of the nation-states (Herrmann and Brewer
2004: 14-16, Risse 2004). The two models do not exclude each other, but
often work together for the same objectives.
In the opinion of some researchers, the ‘European identity’ is an empty
label (Breakwell 2004), or, at best, a vague one, since it does not contain
well-defined values and allows the member-states to raise what they perceive to be European values (often their own national values) to a European
level, discriminating by this procedure against any state that does not share
them. The result would be the creation of a ‘German Europe’, a ‘French
Europe’, etc. However, while some claim that the concept of ‘European
identity’ should be defined better in order to avoid such a situation (Castano
2004), others claim that, on the contrary, it should be left open so as to
enable the process of enlargement without any discrimination between the
in-group values and the would-be members’ values (Mummendey and
Waldzus 2004).
The EU borders remain open as long as the Union is ready to welcome
new members. The EU consequently plays a great role in influencing stateidentity: membership to this supra-regional institution becomes a matter of
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prestige to any nation-state, due to the EU’s ‘successfully appropriating the
term ‘Europe’ for itself’ (Laffan 2004: 79). At the same time, the EU is a global actor, so it also contains an element of global identity (Laffan 2004).
But what is European identity? The main values fostered by the
European treaties and especially by the European Constitution (which
sparked off many debates in 2005 around the issue of identity) are of a civic
nature — peace, reconciliation, cooperation to regulate state power,
democracy, justice, the rule of law, human rights, as well as freedom, tolerance, equality or solidarity:
The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom,
democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination,
tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between men and women prevail. (The European Constitution, Article I-2)
These values represent most of the ‘what’ in the European identity
framework. They are important for the status of member-state as well, since
no state can join the EU without observing them and no state may remain a
member of the European Union if it fails to respect them. Symbols were
added to contribute to ‘a common framework of meaning’ (Laffan 2004):
the flag, the common passport cover, the anthem, the Euro.
Nevertheless, civic and political coordinates alone are hardly enough
to awaken the sense of belonging to the large European family among citizens of the continually expanding European club. Therefore, the EU space
needs to be culturally and historically defined as well, to bridge the gap
between most citizens’ identification of the EU in civic and political terms,
and of Europe in cultural, historical and social terms (Bruter 2004). In spite
of the efforts of some politicians to impose a joint model of European collective identity (civic, political and cultural), it would appear that the EU
remains a civic construction, built around liberal values, with a strong
impact on the concept of national state (Risse 2004).
In this paper my interest lies with the following research questions:
what types of EU values are promoted in the Romanian politicians’ speeches and upon what forms of legitimation do they rely in order to win the population over to such values? What values, on the other hand, are recognized
and embraced as European by Romanian citizens and what type of legitimation prevails among them? The case studies represent a first stage in a
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larger project and no general conclusions are to be drawn at this moment.
Rather, especially with respect to the Romanian political discourse, where I
have dealt with one text only, my research attempts to establish existing tendencies.
2. Analytical Framework
I have chosen an approach which focuses on the orientation to difference of texts (Fairclough 2003), and which distinguishes between texts that
are open to difference, at one end of the continuum, and texts that ‘suppress’ difference, at the other. The former are highly dialogical, in Bakhtin’s
(1981) understanding of the concept, as an articulation in texts of different
voices and viewpoints, competing for meaning. The latter exclude controversies and opposing definitions and promote an artificial consensus
between the issuers of the text and its receivers. Undialogized language is,
according to Bakhtin (1981), authoritative or absolute.
A text which is dialogical to a great extent is linguistically characterized
by the inclusion of other voices, often under the form of reported speech, in
a clash of ideas to be negotiated or debated with. On the contrary, a text
which suppresses difference is based on assumptions, non-modalized
assertions (categorical statements) and predictions (Fairclough 2003: 43).
These textual devices lead to the projection as universal truths of opinions
held by a particular group. Assumptions may be existential (about what
exists), propositional (about what is the case) and value assumptions
(about what is good or desirable) (Fairclough 2003: 55).
The degree of dialogicality is interrelated with the legitimation strategies used in a text. Such strategies are reflected in the semantic and grammatical relations between clauses and sentences. Texts may employ either
an ‘explanatory’ logic, based on causal relations, dialogicality and elaborate
explanation, or a ‘logic of appearances’, which takes the form of a ‘hortatory report’ (Faircough 2003: 94ff.). A report of this type presents a state of
affairs or the solutions to a problem as given, not to be questioned or interacted with in other ways except for their acceptance: ‘description with a
covert prescriptive intent, aimed at getting people to act in certain ways on
the basis of representations of what is’ (Fairclough 2003: 96).
Rationalization (van Leeuwen, in Fairclough 2003: 98) is a legitimation strategy which uses an explanatory logic, realized in semantic relations of
causality and purpose and, syntactically, in hypotaxis and embedding.
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Mythopoesis (van Leeuwen, in Fairclough 2003: 98) is a legitimation strategy specific to the hortatory report, which uses semantic relations of extension and elaboration, syntactically realized in parataxis; it also uses existential and propositional assumptions, predictions and value assumptions.
Mythopoesis may combine with authorization, or ‘reference to the authority of tradition, custom, law, and of persons in whom some kind of institutional authority is vested’ and all of them resort to moral evaluation or ‘reference to value systems’ (van Leeuwen, in Fairclough 2003: 98).
The types of logico-semantic relations mentioned in the previous paragraph stem from Halliday’s functional grammar (1994), which divides them
into expansion and projection, which, in turn, have further subtypes:
(1) expansion:
(a) elaboration (‘restating in other words, specifying in greater detail, commenting, or exemplifying’);
(b) extension (‘adding some new element, giving
an exception to it, or offering an alternative’);
(c) enhancing (‘qualifying it with some circumstantial feature of time, place, cause or condition);
(2) projection:
(a) locution — direct or indirect;
(b) idea — direct or indirect (Halliday 1994: 219220).
Grammatically, they are realized in syntax by parataxis, hypotaxis or
embedding (which is considered less relevant in the analysis, due to its
lower rank in the clause) (Halliday 1994, Fairclough 2003).
3. The case studies
3.1. Political discourse
The text I have selected for analysis is a political statement made by
Roberta Alma Anãstase, Romanian MP (Chamber of Deputies), in the meeting of the Chamber of Deputies on May 9, 2006, on the occasion of celebrating Europe Day. It is entitled ‘Europa ºi România’ [‘Europe and Romania’].
My reasons for choosing this text as relevant are its topic, namely European
and Romanian values, and the activity of its author in a European Unionrelated frame: as member of the Commission for European Integration of
the Parliament of Romania and of the Commission for European Affairs of
the Parliament of Romania, and, at present, Member of the European
Parliament for Romania, which indicates a high degree of contact with
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European institutions. The text is, above all, illustrative of this particular MP’s
public discourse on matters of European identity. It is impossible to accurately determine the degree of her actual identification with European
ideals on the basis of merely one political statement. The text is, however,
part of the persuasion strategy she employs to legitimise the EU and its institutions, in the eyes of her fellow MPs, as well as of citizens potentially interested in the transcripts of parliamentary meetings regularly posted on the
Internet.
I shall present below my conclusions to the analysis, in terms of the
framework introduced in 1.2 above. I have included in the Appendix paragraphs 4, 5, and 6 of the text, in my translation, as representative of the
entire statement.
3.1.1. Dialogicality: The text is hardly dialogical. The only voices present are the voices of the ‘founding fathers’ of the EU, in particular that of
Jean Monnet in Paragraph 3, as part of the legitimation strategy by authorization (van Leeuwen, in Fairclough 2003: 98). There is also an allusion to a
hypothetical question asked by the people ‘What does it mean to be
European?’, in Paragraph 2. However, there is no attempt to set the premises for a debate around this issue; all that the MP does is give it an answer
rooted in a unique version of ‘Europeanness’.
One of the claims of the statement is the co-existence in the European
identity of civic, political and economic values, on the one hand, and of cultural values (tradition and history) on the other. The absence of dialogicality is, from this point of view, remarkable, considering that there are staunch
supporters of an exclusively civic and political European identity. The MP
chooses nevertheless not to engage in a dialogue with them, but to ignore
the existence of any divergent standpoints. She does not ‘explore’ conflicting opinions, but simply brackets difference and presents the audience with
a view of the European Union based on consensus.
As a result, the text draws heavily on assumptions, such as the ones in
Paragraph 4. In the brackets below I have highlighted in italics the textual
triggers of the assumptions (see Appendix for the entire paragraph):
There exist a tradition and history that bind Europeans. (tradition and history which)
There are ideals and values rooted in the common tradition and history.
(Tradition and history reflect ideals and values)
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They were developed and pursued. (the development and the pursuit of
…)
The EU exists due to them. (…could not have existed without…)
Since Paragraph 1 contends that the EU is desirable, it is implied, by
extension, that such ideals and values are also desirable. The assumptions
in the text are completed with assertions about a state of affairs that leaves
the audience with no alternative but approval:
They [the values] have been spread in Europe and all over the world.
They have given the EU a cultural foundation.
They give the EU access to the citizens’ hearts.
The series of assumptions and assertions grows in the following paragraphs, projecting European values and identity as highly desirable and,
actually, as the only path to take by Romania. I have used italics to point out
the textual triggers of the assumptions:
a) assumptions:
Europe is something good, desirable (the world needs it).
The EU is now the citizens’ home. (has become)
Democracy and opportunities are desirable (certitude, strong, multitude,
available).
There is a Romania which is not a European state (Romania as a European
state)
The day of May 9 has a resonance inside of each of us. (through)
We are not aware of our status of European citizens. (it makes us aware)
European values are desirable. (cherishing)
We are not in Europe without them. (return to Europe)
There exist symbols of the EU.
There is a hierarchy of symbols. (the most important)
European values are desirable (significance)
European citizens acquire a status. (the status that European citizens acquire)
European citizens conform to European values. (by conforming)
b) assertions:
— non-modalized:
The EU means democracy and opportunities.
We are citizens of the United Europe.
The meaning of Europe has been embedded in the meaning of Romania.
Romania means Europe.
Europen values are reflected in the status of European citizen.
— modalized:
Each of us may feel at home…
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3.1.2. Meaning relations: It is mostly elaboration and extension that
are used, which present the EU as an epitome of shared cultural and social
values, equivalent to Europe (as common cultural heritage), but also as an
epitome of civic values (citizenship). A sign of equality is placed between
the EU and democracy and opportunities, then between Romania and the
EU and, by analogy, between Romania and democracy and opportunities:
the EU = traditions and history = cultural values and ideals = Europe =
democracy and opportunities = home to its citizens = Romania as a
European state
Consequently, if Romanian citizens do not embrace the European values highlighted in the text, Romania is not a European state and it cannot
be said to belong in Europe. The conclusion the audience are faced with is
that there is no other option. Romania must integrated into Europe, therefore Romania must live up to the European ideals. The text is a hortatory
report, based on a logic of appearances, from which rationalization, as a
legitimation strategy, is missing, being replaced mainly with mythopoesis,
authorization and moral evaluation.
3.2. Ordinary citizens: forum discourse
The texts analyzed are answers to the two questions asked by the
organisers of the forum ‘Ce intenþii aveþi odatã cu aderarea la UE?’ (‘What
are your intentions now that Romania has joined the EU?’), on the BBC
Romania site — January 1, 2007 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/romanian/forum/story/
2007/01/070101_ue_aderare_intentii.shtml). The questions are: ‘What
changes will this event bring about in your personal life?’ and ‘Do you intend
to look for a job in another EU country (if you live in Romania)?’
My research objectives are: (1) to establish whether the participants in
the forum mention any envisaged changes of their identity; if so, whether
they perceive them as desirable or threatening; (2) to establish what types
of European values are mentioned (those in Article I-2 of the Constitution,
mainly civic and liberal values, or others); (3) to determine whether the citizens’ discourse is dialogical or not and what types of legitimation strategies
are used.
There are 60 entries in the forum, 2 by the same participants, out of
which 55 are relevant to my research objectives. The forum boasts 58 participants, of whom 5 do not say where they come from, one decides to
256
remain anonymous, 1 comes from the Republic of Moldova, 27 from
Romania and 24 from the Romanian diaspora — Canada, the U.S., the
Netherlands, the UK, Italy, Spain, Austria and Japan. Three of the entries are
euro-sceptical, most of the others euro-optimistic.
Below there is a table containing the European values as identified in
the first part of the paper (See section 1), and a quantitative analysis of their
occurrences in the participants’ entries. I have counted as one occurrence
only a value which is mentioned several times in the same entry:
European values
Participants’ answers
Respect for human dignity
3
Freedom
Freedom of movement — 8 (labour)
Freedom of movement — 6 (travelling)
Political freedom — 2
Democracy
1
Equality
2 (equality with the other European citizens)
The rule of law
Respect for human rights
Pluralism
Non-discrimination
1
Tolerance
1 (as ‘mutual respect’) + 1
Justice
4
Solidarity
1 (with member-states of the EU)
Equality between men and women
Other values
a more “European attitude”/a change of mentality — 7
a new work mentality — 4
normality (of the ante-communism type) — 1
economic growth/ higher living standards — 17
Western opportunities — 7 (1 for common market)
better education opportunities (both in
Romania and abroad) — 3
the Euro — 1
access to information — 2
environmental protection — 1
European tradition — 1
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The most numerous occurrences registered in the forum discourse are
the European values of freedom, economic growth and better living conditions (where we might also include ‘opportunities’).
The majority of the European values mentioned by the forum participants fall in the category of ‘things that are going to change in Romania from
now on’, the assumption being that such values are not yet cherished or not
cherished enough in the Romanian society. There are also two entries in
which anxiety about losing something of the national identity or of the good
aspects of living in the pre-EU Romania is expressed (entries 59 and 60):
anxiety about having to eat only tasteless food, produced according to EU
food regulations, anxiety about the disappearance of the archaic villages in
Romania, about increased competition and even about European values,
considered as responsible for colonialism, postcolonialism, two world
wars, communism and a threat to national sovereignty (entry 60). There is
also fear of the costs of integration and of the corruption of the political
class, which will make life harder for ordinary Romanians (entries 59 and
52). Finally, there are nationalistic reactions, which are not targeted against
the EU, but take the form of an urge for Romanians to stay at home and preserve the traditional Romanian values (entry 20).
Most of the messages are Euro-optimistic, even if few Romanians
describe themselves as ‘European.’ There is in fact only one entry in which
someone says: ‘It is my right as a EU citizen to work.’ This is understandable,
however, considering that Romania had just become a EU member at the
time of the forum. What the online messages show is openness towards
embracing a European identity, and, most importantly, a desire to be treated in the same manner as other European citizens. The explanation for this
attitude might be that, before January 1, 2007, Romania belonged to the outgroup, it had the status of a would-be member, and was required to accept
and enforce European rules and regulations. Citizens now expect the proper reward for their efforts.
The entries are dialogical to a moderate degree. First of all, there are
other voices present in the entries: the voices of Romanian politicians in, for
instance, ‘Years on end politicians have kept us in the dark about the sideeffects of integration, and now they’ve started to talk about costs,’ as well as
the voices of several of the participants — there are exchanges of ideas,
agreement or disagreement on an issue, or polemics around nationalistic
attitudes.
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There is also a reversal of the official discourse on European integration — it is not only Romania that should join the EU, but it’s also the EU
(and the world) that should join Romania:
Romania’s integration into the EU means Europe’s and the World’s integration into Romania. […] the World will see Romania’s true face… (entry
48)
My dream is for Romania to become a model for the rest of Europe and I
am sure we will! (entry 45)
Romania’s integration into the EU means a lot to our country and a lot
more to Europe. (entry 16)
Moreover, the EU is not presented as the only choice available, since
many of the assertions are modalised. There are metaphorical realizations
of cognitive and affective mental processes, introduced by ‘I hope,’ ‘I think,’
‘I guess,’ ‘I’d like’, or instances of median modality, for example ‘the
Romanians should’, as opposed to the politicians’ discourse based on prescriptions, non-modalised assertions or assumptions.
The legitimation strategies used are rationalization, personal authorization — e.g. ‘I’m telling you that…,’ moral evaluation, based on value
assumptions, and mythopoesis, but to a lesser extent than in the MP’s discourse; they rely on moral tales, rather than cautionary tales of the type ‘If
we don’t cherish EU values, great misfortunes will befall us.’ There are significantly numerous instances of rationalization, of explanations of causes
and emphases of purposes:
The EU gives us a lot of money in structural funds, EXTENSION/CONCESSION but it’s not welfare benefits, ENHANCEMENT/EFFECT so we have to
think carefully about how to invest it. (entry 40)
I intend to work in the EU ENHANCEMENT/REASON because salaries are
very low in Romania. (entry 33)
At present I’m working in the UK in construction. EXTENSION I want to
come back home as soon as possible ENHANCEMENT/REASON because I
think PROJECTION/IDEA that joining the EU will open up many opportunities in Romania. EXTENSION Moreover, there’s nowhere like home. (entry
28)
I have few hopes, EXTENSION/CONCESSION but, ENHANCEMENT/PURPOSE in order to check my limits and given the novelty of the experience,
I will definitely try. (entry 5)
259
The participants in the forum show enthusiasm about acquiring a
European identity. Their attitude is based, nevertheless, on a careful balancing of advantages and disadvantages, and their openness towards such an
identity comes from the prestige, personal welfare and freedom they associate with it. They see European identity mostly in terms of a civic and political identity, not of a cultural one, which confirms the fact that Romania will
face the same problems as most of the other EU states, unless more energy is spent on promoting EU’s cultural values, in addition to its institutional
ones. Some Romanian citizens also voice divergent opinions, which echo
the fear of losing their national identity. To return to the beginning of the discussion, the identity patterns to be envisaged at the level of the population
are those of cross-cut identities, but also, in an authentic transnational spirit, of ‘marble-cake’ identities, an entanglement of Romanian and European
identities.
The case studies presented above are to be taken as departure points
in a larger project about the development of the concept of European identity in Romania, both at institutional level and among ordinary citizens.
References
Anãstase, A. R. 2006 [May 9]. Europa ºi România [Europe and Romania]. Available at:
http://www.edep.ro/pls/steno/steno.stenograma?ids=6095&idm=1.42&idl=1
Bakhtin, M. 1981. The Dialogical Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Breakwell, G.M. 2004. ‘Identity Change in the Context of the Growing Influence of
European Union Institutions’ in Transnational Identities: Becoming European
in the EU. Herrmann, R.K., Th. Risse, and M.B. Brewer (eds.), pp. 25-39.
Bruter, M. 2004. ‘Civic and Cultural Components of a European Identity: A Pilot
Model of Measurement of Citizens’ Levels’ in Transnational Identities:
Becoming European in the EU. Herrmann, R.K., Th. Risse, and M.B. Brewer
(eds.), pp. 186-213.
Castano, E. 2004. ‘European Identity: A social-Psychological Perspective’ in
Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU. Herrmann, R.K., Th.
Risse, and M.B. Brewer (eds.), pp. 40-58.
Fairclough, N. 2003. Analyzing Discourse: textual analysis for social research. London
and New York: Routledge.
Halliday, M.A.K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.
Herrmann, R.K. and M.B. Brewer. 2004. ‘Identities and Institutions: Becoming
European in the EU’ in Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU.
Herrmann, R.K., Th. Risse, and M.B. Brewer (eds.), pp. 1-22.
260
Herrmann, R.K., Th. Risse, and M.B. Brewer (eds.). 2004. Transnational Identities:
Becoming European in the EU. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto and
Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
Laffan, B. 2004. ‘The European Union and Its Institutions as “Identity Builders”’ in
Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU. Herrmann, R.K., Th.
Risse, and M.B. Brewer (eds.), pp. 75-96.
Meinhof, U.H. 2004. ‘Europe Viewed from Below: Agents, Victims, and the Threat of
the Other’ in Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU.
Mummendey, A. and S. Waldzus. 2004. ‘National Differences and European Plurality:
Discrimination or Tolerance between European Countries’ in Transnational
Identities: Becoming European in the EU. Herrmann, R.K., Th. Risse, and M.B.
Brewer (eds.), pp. 59-72.
Risse, Th. 2004. ‘European Institutions and Identity Change: What Have We
Learned?’ in Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU.
Wodak, R. 2004. ‘National and Transnational identities: European and Other
Identities Constructed in Interviews with EU Officials’ in Transnational
Identities: Becoming European in the EU. Herrmann, R.K., Th. Risse, and M.B.
Brewer (eds.), pp. 97-128.
261
APPENDIX
Europe and Romania
Tradition and history «which bind us with the other states» reflect ideals
and values «that have been disseminated not only on the European continent
but all over the world, ENHANCEMENT IN EMBEDDED CLAUSE creating, beyond
the dimensions «which have given the European Union its political shape», a
Europe — symbol of cultural foundations». ELABORATION The United Europe
could not have existed without the development and the pursuit of cultural and
social values « that may help it to gain access not only to the citizens’ purses,
but also to their hearts». (P4)
The contemporary world, in a constant rapid growth, needs Europe.
EXTENSION For its citizens, the European Union has become the equivalent of
the word ‘home’. ELABORATION The certitude of a strong democracy and
especially the multitude of opportunities available have been embedded in the
meaning of Europe. EXTENSION/ADDITION And I dare claim PROJECTION that
the meaning of Europe has been embedded in the meaning of Romania as a
European state. 9 May, through the resonance it has for each of us, makes us
aware of our status of citizens of the United Europe. ENHANCEMENT/REASON
And that is why each of us may feel at ‘home’ in the European Union, ELABORATION cherishing the European values like a return to «what it really means to
be part of Europe». (P5)
The Euro, the flag, the anthem, the motto ‘Unity in diversity’ are symbols of
the European Union. ENHANCEMENT/CONCESSION But the most important
symbol is the significance of its values, ELABORATION reflected in the status
«that European citizens acquire» ELABORATION by conforming to these ideals
and role-models. (P6)
«…» - are used to mark embedded clauses.
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
LINGUISTIC RESOURCES OF BIAS IN NEWS DISCOURSE
DELIA ROBESCU
Politehnica University of Timiºoara
Abstract: The paper investigates linguistically achieved bias in news discourse
and discusses potentially biased language structures / phenomena, such as
passives, nominalizations, topic derivation, metaphorization, etc., which, if
used in specific contexts, generate biased representations of newsworthy facts.
Introduction
In Ethical Issues in Journalism and the Media (Belsey & Chadwick
(eds.) 1995: 27) John O’Neill argues that “The journalist exists in two
worlds: he or she enters a practice that is characterized by a commitment
to truth-telling, and at the same time is an employee who works for a wage
and is expected to produce a story of the kind demanded by his or her
newspaper, magazine or TV station.” His remark epitomizes the nature of
current journalistic practice characterized by the clash between the truthtelling value and the pressures exerted by the political and financial interests dominating our contemporary society. Bias, persuasion, disinformation, intoxication, manipulation have become common press descriptors
pointing to various degrees of deviation from objective, perspicuous journalistic information and reproduction.
The French social theorist Baudrillard (apud Brînzeu 1997: 184) coins
the reality-recreating phenomenon “Timiºoara Syndrome” and argues that
mass-media has the force and ability to reconstruct the ‘real’ reality and
shape a new reality, a hyperreality, through projection of false images of
what is real.
Translated into journalistic terms, this phenomenon is described as the
agenda-extension theory (Kuypers 2002: 5-11), which represents the further
development of the agenda-setting theory (McCombs & Shaw 1972),
according to which press sets our agenda by selecting certain stories which
become important only because they are chosen to appear in the newspaper. We read what journalists decide to insert in the newspaper. From the
266
very beginning, they seek to impose on us what to read and, implicitly, what
to think. Kuypers further extends the agenda-setting theory, arguing that
“Whereas agenda-setting serves to focus public attention upon an issue,
agenda-extension occurs when the media move beyond a neutral reporting
of events…… the media do more than tell the public what to think about;
they also tell the public how to think about any given topic” (2002: 6).
Telling the news reader how to distill information is achieved through
framing strategies which allow the salience of certain aspects of the news
event while minimizing or/and discarding others. The news reporter acts as
a focalizer by projecting frames that enable specific cognitive backgrounds
and interpretative stances through which news events are approached and
filtered by news readers. It is this dimension of news production, the framing stage, that facilitates the generation of bias through linguistic devices
recognizable at surface-text processing.
The article addresses the issue of news bias from a linguistic perspective and analyses three linguistic devices employed by news writers for
stance taking purposes in printed news: lexical choice, assignment of
semantic roles and passivization.
Lexical Choice
At first glance, news framing may be analysed in terms of individual
lexical items deliberately chosen by the news writer to frame news actors
and events, since they are the first attention-drawing cognitive elements
which support and affect the reality-creating force of language and thereby
facilitate a biased informational load.
Van Dijk (1988: 81) speaks of this creating-distorting dimension of language by drawing attention to the meaning implications entailed by the
terms “terrorist” and “freedom fighter” when applied to the same person,
where the former activates negative connotations in the readers’ mind
while the latter activates positive ones.
Undoubtedly, the terms al-Qaeda suspect and ‘top Bin Laden aide’,
naming one and the same person, may echo differently in the reader’s
mind. The former resonates rather neutrally, while the polysemy of the latter (short of aide-de-camp, designating a military officer acting as assistant
to a superior Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary) activates the idea of guilty
person in the reader’s perception.
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
In the same line of thought, René Florio (apud Popescu 2005: 81)
appreciates that “the same woman, if she is the lover of an unemployed
man, is referred to as ‘his girlfriend’; if the story is about an entrepreneur,
she is a ‘dependant’; the lover of an anarchist is ‘his female comrade’, an
emperor’s lover will be a ‘favourite’, and a poet’s lover will be his ‘muse’.”
(my translation).
Series of quasi-synonyms organized in lexical fields such as unrest,
rebellion, revolution, mutiny, uprising, or rebel, assailant, revolutionary,
guerrilla are characterized by bias-proneness, since they enable news writers to make the visible invisible and the invisible visible. By choosing a particular hyponym from the series, the news reporter allows maximization
and, implicitly, the simultaneous minimization of specific semantic features,
which, if strategically contextualized, lead to the distortion of reality.
Take, for example, the news story below, reporting on illegal work preventing inspections.
Illegal workers held after raid on Wembley
A gang of illegal Romanian workers has been arrested at Wembley stadium during a raid by immigration officers.
Around a dozen illegal workers were given £1,000 on-the-spot fines after
getting jobs on the FA’s flagship project.
The immigration swoop, one of the first since Romania and Bulgaria
joined the EU, will raise new doubts about Britain’s border controls and be
a major embarrassment to the FA and Multiplex, the company building
Wembley.
It will prompt renewed concern about the ease with which illegal workers
from the two new EU countries can gain work in Britain despite the strict
curbs announced by Home Secretary John Reid.
…………………………………………………………………………
It is understood that the Wembley raid took place after a tip off to the
Government’s Immigration and Nationality Directorate from Multiplexabout employees working for one of its contractors. The Romanians,
thought to have been earning around £80 a day, were taken to a police station and given £1,000 fines.
One source said the Romanians, who were working with colleagues from
Poland and other countries, had been dismayed to find themselves targeted.
268
„It was a major shock. One moment the Romanians were working on site
and the next they were hauled off to a police station,“ he said. „They were
told they would either have to pay £1,000 or go to jail for two months. But
most of them don’t have that kind of money.“ (Story continues)
(The Daily Mail, 13 February 2007)
Illegal employees working for Multiplex, the world-wide known
Australian construction company involved in the rebuilding of Wembley,
Britain’s iconic soccer stadium, Romanian workers are framed as a gang
not as a team of workers and, inevitably, perceived by the readership as a
bunch of criminals, whose actions and behaviours are law breaking and
morally condemnable.
The stark contrast between the generic, neutral term ‘group’, its
hyponym ‘team’, which contextually would have been much more appropriate to use when referring to a group of people who work together to do
a job, and the preferred incriminating term ‘gang’, designating a group of
criminals that work together, is indicative of the social bias propagated by
some English journalists, in an attempt to inculcate false perceptions about
Romanian immigrants as being lawbreakers and social enemies.
The biased framing of Romanian workers as criminals is further reinforced by the presence of criminal behaviour describing lexis. Instead of
inspection, control or check, the reporter chooses raid and swoop, both
items entailing sudden, unexpected visits to a place by police in search for
something illegal. Moreover, the Romanian workers are not taken to the
police station, but they are hauled off, i.e. they are escorted and forced to
go to prison by police, and all this is happening because of a tip off, that is
a piece of secret information given to police about illegal activities.
Summing up, it must be pointed up that biased framing is to be
approached in terms of a deliberately made lexical choice from a set of lexical items forming a lexical field or from a wider range of options geared to
side the news text with an already socially dominant ideology or one which
is intended to be imposed and socially ratified.
Assignment of Semantic Roles
One may approach the framing of newsworthy events in Halliday’s
terms (1994: 106-130) by viewing the clause as the representation of a
process which entails selecting a process type (material, mental, relational,
existential etc.), participants (agentive, affected, recipient, instrumental,
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
etc.) and circumstantial elements (time, space, manner). Halliday maintains that “instead of Mary saw something wonderful, I may choose to say
Mary came upon a wonderful sight, where the process has been represented as a material process came upon and the perception has been turned
into a ‘participant’ a sight. Or I may say a wonderful sight met Mary’s eyes,
with the process of perception split up into Actor a sight, material Process
meet and Goal eyes; and Mary represented simply as the possessor of the
eyes. These are all plausible representations of one and the same non-linguistic ‘state of affairs’. They are definitely not synonymous; the different
encodings all contribute something different to the total meaning” (1994:
344).
In news discourse, power relations and ideological stances can be
encoded in the process of assigning semantic roles to news actors through
various predications, as agent-participants, recipient-participants, patient
participants, instrumental participants, beneficiary participants etc. It has
become a common practice to frame discriminated, powerless categories
as affected participants whereas favoured, powerful categories will in all
likelihood be framed as agentive participants.
Moreover, the practice of sycophantic journalism is to conduct news
event framing upon the principle maximize your strengths, minimize your
weaknesses, maximize your enemy’s weaknesses, minimize their strengths
(cf Van Dijk 1998: 21-63, Sweitzer 1996). Thus, powerful groups will most
likely occur as agents of praiseworthy actions, while their negative behaviour is omitted or mitigated, leaving the affected participant semantic role to
powerless groups, whose positive actions are purposely diminished, if not
left out.
Notice how, in the news item below, semantic role assignment
becomes a discriminatory linguistic device against the powerless group of
illegal immigrants.
New crackdown on illegal immigrants (1)
Home Secretary John Reid will this week launch a drive to deny illegal
immigrants (2) the benefits of living in the UK.
Immigration minister Liam Byrne said the initiative would involve a crossGovernment effort to ensure that illegals (3) cannot get housing, healthcare or work.
270
Reports suggested that this could include fines of up to £20,000 for landlords who rent properties to illegal immigrants (4) and £5,000 for bosses
who knowingly employ them.
The News of the World also reported that Home Office officials have been
put into the DVLA to crack down on illegal immigrants (5) applying for
driving licences.
Mr Byrne told ITV1’s The Sunday Edition: „We are announcing the first
cross-Government strategy to block the benefits of Britain if you are here
illegally.
„It is bringing together public agencies from across Government to block
benefits like housing, healthcare, National Insurance numbers, work, for
those who are here illegally.“ (Story continues)
(The Daily Mail, 4 March 2007)
It is by no means clear that the five occurrences of illegal immigrants,
1) affected participants (will be imposed a new crack down)
(headline)
2) affected participants (will be denied the benefits of living in the
UK) (paragraph 1)
3) beneficiary participants (beneficiaries of an unfavourable
social measure) (paragraph 2)
4) instrumental participants (instruments of distress, i.e. fines, for
landlords and bosses) (paragraph 3)
5) affected participants (will be denied application for driving
licence) (paragraph 4),
shape a discreditable and clearly humiliating image of this social category. This recurrence in assigning semantic roles that facilitate the articulation of an unfavourable portrayal of immigrants is supportive of and congruent with the immigrant dehumanizing ideology controlled by the incumbent
government.
The Passive-Active Relation in News Discourse
Although the general rule, in the case of passive structures, is to leave
the agent unexpressed, since speakers focus their attention on the active
object not the passive agent, an interrogation of the agent recoverability
proves extremely helpful in assessing the degree of bias embedded in news
items.
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
Grammarians (Quirk et al. 1980: 807, Side & Wellman 2001: 34) appreciate that around 20% of passive sentences omit the agent because of its
irrelevancy and what matters most is the affected participant. Quirk further
speaks of frequency constraints and relates passive/active uses to the distinction between “informative and imaginative prose rather than to a difference of subject matter or of spoken and written English. The passive is generally more commonly used in informative than in imaginative writing,
notably in the objective, non-personal style of scientific articles and news
items” (1980: 808).
Passivization is extensively used in news discourse primarily because,
by allowing compression of information, it helps to simplify the message,
making it more comprehensible, straightforward, impersonal and noninvolving. Additionally, it helps to save editorial space, thus increasing the
reading tempo and making the discourse more dynamic.
However, there is a major downside entailed by the deletion of the
agent and, sometimes, of the goal of the action, allowed by the passive
structure, since such deletions may turn out to be deliberate acts of omission with a view to conceal specific bits of information, contextually
unfavourable for the agentive participant. The news item below is a case in
point and underpins the idea that, once the non-expressed/surface agent
has been recovered, a new outlook on the news report is beginning to take
shape.
U.S. soldier accused of aiding the enemy
BAGHDAD - A senior U.S. officer has been charged with nine offenses,
including aiding the enemy and fraternizing with the daughter of a
detainee while he commanded a military police detachment at an
American detention facility near Baghdad, the military said Thursday.
Army Lt. Col. William H. Steele was accused of giving „aid to the enemy“
by providing an unmonitored cell phone to detainees.
Steele was the commander of the 451st Military Police Detachment at
Camp Cropper, a U.S. detention center on the western outskirts of
Baghdad, when the offenses allegedly occurred between October 2005
and February, military spokesman Lt. Col. James Hutton said.
Steele was being held in Kuwait pending a grand jury investigation,
Hutton said.
272
The other charges included unauthorized possession of classified information, fraternizing with the daughter of a detainee, maintaining an inappropriate relationship with an interpreter, storing classified information in his
quarters and possessing pornographic videos, the military said.
Steele also was charged with improperly marking classified information,
failing to obey an order and failing to fulfill his obligations in the expenditure of funds, the military said.
Camp Cropper, located near the Baghdad airport, replaced the notorious
Abu Ghraib prison as the main detention facility in the capital area.
(The New York Times, 28 April 2007)
Apparently, the news item takes the shape of a prototypical news
report which does not violate journalistic norms. It just reports facts by giving enough precise details about the main actor, the actions in which he
was involved, the location where events took place, without inserting evaluative comments or interpreting events by making predictions and mentioning consequences.
Assessed in terms of informativeness constraints, imposed by the topic
under discussion (i.e. allegations), the text proves to be grossly deficient. In
view of the journalistic libel risk, any accusation brought against somebody
is normally expected to be backed up by evidence and issued by a legitimate authority in order to meet the credibility requirement. The accusations
made against the US officer are framed as the most salient information, but
there is no information precisely specifying the identity of the legal authority lawfully entitled to formulate such serious allegations and validate incriminating evidence. The reader is left to make assumptions about the identity of the agentive participant from the rather vaguely phrased declarative
sentences (…the military said, ….military spokesman Lt. Col. James Hutton
said, …Hutton said) whose subject is three times expressed by a collective
noun.
Moreover, the report fails to provide any kind of evidence capable of
supporting so numerous and serious accusations. It goes without saying
that the presence of unequivocal evidence becomes a pre-requisite for preserving story credibility and truthfulness. The two bits of information
(authority and evidence) being unspecified and guessable, the rightfulness
and legitimacy of these accusations are compromised and so is the behaviour of the accusing legal body. It becomes obvious that the passive voice
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
fulfils a whitewash function in this particular situation by maintaining confusion over the identity of a military authority whose actions and behaviour
are condemnable, a fact reinforced by a follow-up news item informing
that:
Lawyers for a U.S. lieutenant colonel accused of the capital offense of aiding the enemy complained Monday they had been denied access to top
secret evidence as a hearing opened to determine if the officer must stand
trial.
(U.S. Officer in Iraq Faces Charges, The New York Times, 30 April 2007)
The same legal body, whose identity is again left unspecified through
passivization (lawyers had been denied access), hinders defence lawyers’
work and attempts to ‘legally’ rehabilitate the US lieutenant colonel.
Both news reports are biased in siding with the current American ideology of downplaying and whitewashing negative, sometimes, culpable
actions and behaviour of Iraq war-supporting statesmen and army heads
within the socio-political context of an ever-increasing public rage against
the prolongation of the Iraq war.
Conclusions
Press bias has been and will certainly remain among the most debated topics in the journalistic practice since, so far, it has proved to be a social
phenomenon impossible to discard, yet a phenomenon which is likely and
advisable to be controlled. An equally wise and efficacious action in this
direction is to educate the news readership and turn it into a knowledgeable assessor of the news text, a goal to which my paper subscribes by raising awareness about various linguistic devices deployed for discriminatory
purposes. Such devices include: deliberately made lexical choices to activate positive/negative connotations, strategic semantic role assignment and
deployment of passive voice intended to support degrading/upgrading portrayals of news actors/events.
References
Belsey, A., Chadwick, R (eds.). 1995. Ethical Issues in Journalism and the Media.
London: Routledge.
Brînzeu, Pia. 1997. Corridors of Mirrors. Timiºoara: Editura Amarcord.
274
Fowler, R. 1991. Language in the News — Discourse and Ideology in the Press.
London: Routledge.
Halliday, M.A.K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward
Arnold.
Kuypers, J. 2002. Press Bias and Politics. Westport: Praeger.
McCombs, M.E. & Shaw, D. 1972. “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media”, in
Public Opinion Quarterly, 36, pp. 176-187.
Popescu, C.F. 2005. Manual de journalism. Bucureºti: Editura Tritonic.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., Svartik, J. 1980. A Grammar of Contemporary
English. London: Longman.
Side, R. & Wellman, G. 2001. Grammar and Vocabulary for Cambridge Advanced
and Proficiency. London: Longman.
Sweitzer, T. 1996. „Kill or be killed - political campaign strategies“.{Online}.
Available: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2519/is_n9_v17/ai_18792751
[November 1997].
Van Dijk, T. 1988. News as Discourse. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, Inc., Publishers.
Van Dijk, T. 1998. “Opinions and Ideologies in the Press”, in Approaches to Media
Discourse. Bell, A. and P. Garrett (eds.). Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 21-63 .
News reports cited:
Illegal workers held after raid on Wembley, The Daily Mail, February 13, 2007
New crackdown on illegal immigrants, The Daily Mail, March 4, 2007
U.S. soldier accused of aiding the enemy, The New York Times, April 28, 2007
U.S. Officer in Iraq Faces Charges, The New York Times, April 30, 2007
LINGUISTIC FLIM-FLAM?
STEEN SCHOUSBOE
University of Copenhagen
Abstract: In Germanic languages, ablaut (vowel gradation) is best known for
its use in the verbal paradigm, as in spring — sprang — sprung. With the
regularization of the strong verbs, this function is slowly becoming rarer and is
no longer productive. However, ablaut survives in other uses, notably word
formation. The paper offers a closer look at this function.
Ablaut, also called vowel gradation, is a well-known phenomenon in
Indo-European languages. In the Germanic sub-branch of IE languages it is
best known for the part it plays in the paradigms of the so-called strong
verbs. The most widespread ablaut pattern or series in Old English was /i a - u/, corresponding to IE /e - o/. Spring - sprang - sprung is a Modern
English example.
One of the changes from IE to Common Germanic or Proto-Germanic
was the formation of the weak preterite and past participle in /-d/, as in
Modern English walk - walked. I shall not discuss the origin of the weak
preterite here, but the change must have been quite abrupt. Very few strong
verbs were formed in the Germanic languages after the separation from the
parent language and the new pattern became totally dominant.
However, ablaut remains productive in the Modern Germanic languages, though it is used for other purposes, namely in word-formation.
This gives us words and idioms like sing-song, riff-raff, spick and span, etc.
It is this productive use of ablaut in Modern English which is the topic of the
present paper. The phenomenon is treated in the standard literature, e.g.
Jespersen (1942), Quirk et al. (1985) and Marchand (1969).
Jespersen treats the ablaut expressions as a kind of reduplicative compounds and points to expressions like Come, come!, Hear, hear! as well as
girly-girly, goody-goody, for years and years and again and again. While
such examples share the reduplicative feature with the ablaut expressions,
they differ in the important point that they are all based on ordinary words
276
(come, hear, girl, etc.). As we shall see below, this is not the case with all or
even most ablaut expressions.
Jespersen notes that the ablaut of the type treated here, /i - a/, i.e. a
narrow front vowel followed by an open central or back vowel, and, less frequently, /i — a - u(o)/, where the third element is a rounded back vowel, is
found in all parts of the world and is in no way specific to Germanic or even
Indo-European languages. He explains:
The reason why we find everywhere this and not the inverse sequence of
sounds was already hinted at in my book Language, p. 402: you begin with
what is light and indicates littleness and nearness and end with the opposite. On the shrill sound [i] as meaning small, see my paper in Linguistica
283 ff.; cf also the contrast between ‘near’ and ‘far’ in French ci and là, here
and there, German hier and da, dort, etc. The duller and more open sound
is also musically best adapted for the conclusion. The alternation often
serves to express the sound produced by a movement to and fro or the
movement itself as in zig-zag, hence vacillation, indecision, etc. and contemptible things in general. (Jespersen 1942:176)
Quirk et al. (1985: 1579) also treat ablaut expressions under reduplication: “Some compounds have two or more elements which are either identical or only slightly different, eg: goody-goody (‘affectedly good’, informal).
The difference between the two elements may be in the initial consonants,
as in walkie-talkie, or in the medial vowels, eg: criss-cross.” However,
though ablaut expressions may well be regarded as instances of reduplication, they constitute a subtype with its own origin, form and, I believe, its
own function in Modern English. What is typical of the ablaut expressions is
not only that the consonantal frame is reduplicated while the vowel
changes, but that the vowel changes in a specific way, namely the series
mentioned above. In short, what we have here is the modern version of the
Germanic /i - a/ ablaut pattern, not a random vowel change. With regard to
the function of reduplication, Quirk et al. (1985: 1579-1580) say that
“the most common uses of reduplicatives are
(a) to imitate sounds, eg: rat-a-tat (knocking on door), tick-tock (of clock),
ha ha (laughter) bow-wow (of dog)
(b) to suggest alternating movements, eg: seesaw, flip-flop, ping-pong
(b) to disparage by suggesting instability, nonsense, insincerity, vacillation,
etc: higgledy-piggledy, hocus-pocus, wishy-washy, dilly-dally, shillyshally
(d) to intensify, eg: teeny-weeny, tip-top”.
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
They also state that, with respect to style, most reduplicatives are
“highly informal or familiar, and many derive form the nursery, eg. din-din
(‘dinner’)” (Quirk et al. 1985: 1579). The highly informal status is true of the
ablaut expressions as well as the other reduplicatives, but I do not think that
there are ablaut expressions which derive from the nursery.
Marchand’s treatment of the ablaut expressions is comprehensive and
detailed. Like Jespersen and Quirk, he treats ablaut expressions as a subtype of reduplicative compounds. He notes that “pure” reduplication, i.e.
reduplication of an unchanged word as in goody-goody, tap-tap, hush-hush
is not found in English before the 19th century. Ablaut reduplication is much
older, as we have seen. The “pure” reduplicatives, i.e. mere repetition, “is
almost completely restricted to expressive sound words” (Marchand 1969:
83), goody-goody being one of the few exceptions.
According to Marchand (1969: 429), ablaut expressions and rhyme
gemination
are essentially pseudo-compounds, motivated by the significants, whether
they are made up of two real morphemes (as singsong / walkie-talkie), of
only one sign (as chitchat / popsy-wopsy), or whether they are entirely
unmotivated by semantic content (as flimflam / boogie-woogie). They are
not therefore compounds comparable to such types as steamboat or colorblind, which are grammatical syntagmas based on a determinant/determinatum relationship.
Regarding the phonetic form of the ablaut series, Marchand (1969:
431) says that
The member containing the higher vowel always precedes the one that
has the lower vowel. This phonic tendency is widespread. The reasons are
probably physiological as well as psychological: the smaller distance
between tongue and palate for high vowels becomes greater with low
vowels in a natural rise from the smaller to the bigger. The psychological
value of the opposition is therefore quite logically that between high and
low, with the rise preceding the fall.
From a derivational point of view, Marchand divides the ablaut expressions into four groups. By far the largest group is made up of expressions
based on the second element, as chitchat and crisscross. This is. A smaller
group is based on the first element, as mingle-mangle and rickety-rackety.
Marchand (1969: 432) adds “I have considered the onomatopoeic words
clipclop, dingdong, pingpong as consisting of two expressive elements,
278
though actually the sound words clip, ding, ping are recorded earlier than
the twin words”. Actually he includes these in the third group, those that are
based on two elements which are also found in isolation: click-clack, clipclop, ping-pong, flip-flop, drip-drop, etc. Surely the absence or presence of a
hyphen should not be regarded as decisive? The fourth group consists of the
“entirely unmotivated ‘trifle’ words” flimflam, jimjam, trim-tram, riff-raff and
zigzag.
While unmotivated expressions are rare among the ablaut compounds, they are quite common among the rhyming compounds as in
hanky-panky and hurly-burly. Marchand regards this derivational difference
as related to the stylistic difference which he notes: “While both ablaut and
rime are basically playful, ablaut gemination is so in a neutrally aesthetic
way. Rime gemination is facetious, or playful in a childish, even babyish
manner. In contrast to ablaut gemination, it also has a sentimentalizing
effect.” (1969: 435) and “In ablaut combinations, the strict vowel alternation, combined with a definite underlying morpheme, leaves no room for
the complete facetiousness that is possible with rime combinations.” (ibid.)
To sum up: the picture seems reasonably clear as far as the formal
properties of the ablaut pattern are concerned: a high unrounded front
vowel followed by a (rounded or unrounded) low front, low central or low
back vowel and, in the case of /i - a - u/, by a rounded back vowel. Similarly
for the stylistic values of ablaut and rhyme expressions: they all belong in
the informal register and are often playful or jocular.
We will now turn to meaning, i.e. the referential and communicative
potential of these combinations. On rhyming combinations, Marchand
(1969: 434-435) points out that
Rime, the magic fitting together of words, naturally lends itself to being
used in the sphere of jugglery, sorcery, or the like, which accounts for such
words as hocus-pocus, hokey-pokey…Many words connote the idea ‘disorder, confusion, tumult’ or the like, as hugger-mugger, higgledy-piggledy,
hurly-burly…As rime combinations are essentially non-serious, they may
convey derogatory, contemptuous or ridiculing shades of meaning when
used without the intention of being playful. Names for persons are derogatory: fuddy-duddy…Nursery words have only a playful character; they are
not derogatory: humpty-dumpty…Impersonal substantives with a derogatory shade are hurdy-gurdy, rumble-tumble ‘cart’, ragtag, claptrap.
Adjectives fitting into this group are namby-pamby, flibberty-gibberty,
hoity-toity, rumble-tumble.
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
On ablaut combinations, Marchand (1969: 431) remarks that
The symbolism underlying ablaut variation is that of polarity which may
assume various semantic aspects. Words denoting sounds form a large
group, the vowel alternation symbolizing the bipolar range of sound possibilities: click-clack, ding-dong, tick-tock…With words expressive of movement the idea of polarity suggests to and fro rhythm: crinkle-crankle, crisscross, zigzag…Related to this group are words for games, as wiggle-waggle, kit-cat, pingpong, all in a way characterized by two-phase movement.
Another aspect of ‘to and fro movement’ is the idea of hesitation, as we
have it in shilly-shally, dilly-dally…The same basic concept may lead to the
variant of ambivalence, double-faced character, implying the dubious or
spurious value of the referent. Flimflam, jimjam, trimtram, whimwham all
have the original meaning of ‘trash’, ‘trifle’; the word knick-knack also
belongs here. Many words have the basic meaning ‘idle talk’, as bibblebabble, chitchat, fiddle-faddle…In various ways depreciative (on the basis
of ‘ambivalence’) are nominal combinations such as mishmash, minglemangle, slipslop, wishy-washy, singsong, riffraff.
It will appear that the semantic content of polarity can be extended in
numerous ways. The only obvious check is that most ablaut expressions are
based on an existing word, as noted above. Chitchat is semantically related
to chat. With the onomatopoeic expressions, the ablaut pattern suggests
repeated sounds as well as the pitch range. Perhaps the most abstract version of polarity is that of a set: two or three items which are brought together under one heading. One must agree with Jespersen and Marchand that
sound symbolism (i.e. not sound imitation) plays an important part in many
ablaut and rhyme expressions, cf. the well-known meaning of ‘littleness’
connected to the vowel /i/, but it seems clear to me that there are many
ablaut expressions whose meaning cannot be convincingly explained by
sound symbolism in the traditional sense or by the roots on which they are
based. Marchand’s “entirely unmotivated” combinations are among these.
There is nothing little about *bibble, *riff or *zig and nothing big about *babble, *raff or *zag. There is only polarity or number (at least two items) and
- as a consequence of this - a certain extension in time. Marchand’s “to and
fro rhythm” and Quirk’s “alternative movements” and “vacillation” cover
the facts admirably in the case of combinations referring to movement, but
how can we account for ablaut expressions where there is no apparent
sound symbolism in the traditional sense, nor any sense of movement or
vacillation?
280
Riffraff is a case in point, but I believe that it is worthwhile to look at
some other expressions which are not usually included in the treatment of
ablaut expressions, but which, to my mind, reveal the strength of the ablaut
mechanism. Not only does it form words, but also formulaic expressions
and even names.
We always say this and that, never *that and this, cf. Jespersen above.
This and that simply sounds right, by which I mean that it conforms to a
well-known pattern. I do not think it is plausible to regard the meaning of
“here” or “near” as an extension of the symbolic value of /i/ (littleness), but
that does not mean that the sequence is arbitrary. On the contrary, if two
elements are brought together in a formulaic expression, an idiom, it is a
sufficient and necessary condition for the successful use of the ablaut frame
that the element with /i/ precedes the element with the low central or back
vowel. No special meaning is required from any of the elements, only a phonetic form. It is simply by putting the elements into the ablaut frame that the
speaker makes a whole of the parts; and the “parts” need not even have a
prior existence as independent words. They do in this and that and they do
not in riffraff, flimflam, zigzag, etc. Semantically we can distinguish
between proximity and distance and together they constitute a whole made
up of parts, “location in relation to the speaker”. With riff-raff such an analysis is not possible; nevertheless, I believe that it is significant that the word
denotes a (diverse) group or class of people, not an individual.
A word of caution may be needed here. This and that are in contrast,
yet share the function or meaning as demonstratives, so it is natural to bring
them together. I do not mean to say that the only reason why we have the
sequence this and that rather than the opposite is that this has an /i/ and
that an /a/. On the contrary, I think it is in keeping with human perception
and cognition that we proceed from that which is near to that which is far.
We cannot help seeing the world from an egocentric point of view. What I
am saying is that, if for some reason and despite Jespersen’s examples
above, this meant ‘that’ and that meant ‘this’ we would not have developed
the fixed expression *that and this. A parallel analysis of ablaut in the
Germanic (and Indo-European) verbal paradigm would go like this: We
have present time and past time and we often talk about them in the same
context. When we do, it is natural (“egocentric”) to mention present events
and states before past events and states. If the ablaut phenomenon is older
than the verbal conjugation, which I consider very likely though impossible
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
to prove, it would be only natural to use IE /e/ (CG /i/) for the present tense
and /a/ for the past tense.
One of the properties of proper nouns is that they do not refer as common nouns do; they are simply names. Therefore, there is typically no element of sound imitation, or ‘littleness’ or ‘vacillation’ or any of the other
potential meanings mentioned above. Yet they are not beyond the scope of
productive ablaut formation. Let me end by giving two examples:
In his biography Dickens, Peter Ackroyd (1990: 393) discusses
Dickens’s performance as a magician: “and at a later date he called himself
‘The Unparalleled Necromancer Rhia Rhama Rhoos’ amongst whose tricks
were The Travelling Doll Wonder, The Pudding Wonder, and The
Conflagration Wonder.” Dickens may have been acquainted with the Indian
name Rhama and the rest of his assumed name was supplied by the ablaut
pattern. Together they make a whole (and formidable) name out of three
individual names.
When, in 1949, Disney’s Donald Duck was introduced in Denmark in
the form of a monthly magazine, the translator did an admirable job with
the names of the characters. Donald, a little-known name in Denmark, was
replaced by Anders And (and means ‘duck’), keeping the alliteration of the
original. His nephews Huey, Louie and Dewey were renamed Rip, Rap and
Rup, always mentioned in that order as required by the ablaut formula. The
trigger here may have been Danish rap meaning ‘quack’, the sound of a
duck. The two other names came naturally, so to speak. The /i - a -u/ pattern is quite common in Danish (more so than in English) and still productive. By using the ablaut formula the translator did what the original did by
means of rhyme: creating a whole (‘Donald’s nephews’) out of the parts
(‘individuals who are the same age and look identical’).
References
Ackroyd, P. 1990. Dickens. London: Longman.
Jespersen, O. 1942. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, vol. VI.
Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
Marchand, H. 1969. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English WordFormation. 2nd ed., München: Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung.
Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech & J. Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar
of the English Language. London: Longman.
ENGLISH PRESENT PERFECT:
ASPECTUAL AND TEMPORAL COMPONENTS
PREDRAG NOVAKOV
University of Novi Sad
Abstract: English Present Perfect does not seem to occupy a specific temporal
section on the time-line; it encompasses the past, the present and possibly the
future. It also implies that certain meanings which could be treated as
aspectual ones (e.g., continuation, recentness, result, experience). The present
study discusses these temporal and aspectual components, with examples
from contemporary British fiction.
1. Introduction
In the relevant synchronic literature, English present perfect has usually been included into two grammatical categories: into the category of tense
or into the category of aspect (and even into a third one — phase, cf. Palmer
1989: 46-47). Pedagogical grammars (e.g. Thomson and Martinet 1992) discuss it together with other tense forms, and a recent comprehensive grammar, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, treats it as nondeictic past tense within the section titled “Perfect Tense”, which denotes
the secondary tense system. In this grammar, the secondary past tense system includes the perfect as the marked member, and the nonperfect as the
unmarked member (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 139). In other comprehensive grammars and studies (Quirk et al. 1985, Brinton 1988), perfect is
discussed as a member in one pair of the two English aspectual oppositions
(progressive-nonprogressive and perfect-nonperfect). In the similar manner, B. Comrie treats English perfect as a specific aspect, different from the
other aspectual progressive-nonprogressive opposition (Comrie 1976: 52).
Therefore, before proceeding with the discussion about English perfect, it is
necessary to define the two main categories related to English perfect-tense
and aspect.
Tense is a deictic category which locates situations in time, measuring
this location from the point of speech (the deictic centre). The deictic centre as the basic orientation point provides only three temporal sections on
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the time-line — present, past and future, so there are further subdivisions in
English. The English past section is thus subdivided into past and before
past. In traditional grammars, tenses are sometimes also divided into
absolute and relative, the former being defined on the basis of the deictic
centre only, the latter needing other points as well.
Developing his approach to tense, H. Reichenbach (1947) used three
points to determine tenses: the point of speech (S), the point of event (E)
and the point of reference (R). As far as English present perfect is concerned, Reichenbach used the formula E — S,R, which means that the
event is located in the past and precedes the point of speech and the reference point, which are simultaneous. The difference between the present
perfect and past nonprogressive lies in the fact that the past has the formula E, R — S, where the point of event and the point of reference coincide
and occur before the point of speech. On the time-line, these points are represented in the following way:
(1)
a) present pefect
______|_____________|________
E
S, R
b) past nonprogressive
______|_____________|________
E, R
S
Therefore, the present perfect occupies a specific position on the
time-line: the event is entirely located in the past or it just began in the past,
but it is viewed from the reference point which is coinciding with the point
of speech.
As far as the category of aspect is concerned, one of the general definitions specifies that aspect implies an internal temporal constituency of a
situation (Comrie 1976: 3) and that English has two aspectual oppositions:
progressive — nonprogressive and perfect — nonperfect. The first opposition presents a situation as a structure (progressive) or as a whole (nonprogressive) (Comrie 1976: 18, 24), whereas the second opposition represents
a different kind of aspect: it does not specify the situation itself, but relates
that situation to another situation (Comrie 1976: 52). Actually, one could say
that perfect aspect implies a link between a situation and the following situation or point in the past, present and future. This link could be established
in different ways, so grammars typically distinguish four or more types of
perfect — the perfect of result, the perfect of recent past, the perfect of persistent situation and the experiential perfect (cf. Comrie 1976: 56-61).
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
2. Temporal and Aspectual Components of English Past, Present
and Future Perfect
The fact that English perfect is classified into the two or three abovementioned grammatical categories shows that it obviously has both temporal and aspectual components — the temporal component being related to
the location in time, and the aspectual one to a specific link with another
situation. However, it appears that the temporal component does not have
the same significance in these three kinds of perfect — past, present and
future. Namely, in the case of past and future perfect, it seems that the link
between situations is primarily temporal, because these two finite verb
forms occupy a clearly definable temporal section on the time-line: past
perfect denotes a past situation preceding another past situation (the formula E — R - S), and future perfect a future situation preceding another
future situation (the formula S - E - R, cf. Reichenbach 1947: 290). These
time-lines and the formulas are:
(2)
a) past perfect
__|_______|_______|____
E
R
S
b) future perfect
_|______|_____|_____
S
E
R
Therefore, it seems that past and future perfect could be quite clearly
defined on the basis of their temporal component alone: they occupy the
temporal sections before past, that is before future.
However, when it comes to present perfect, the temporal component
is more complex, because present perfect does not imply only one clearly
delimited temporal segment on the time-line: the event itself is primarily
located in the past, but it could include the present moment and a portion
of the future. Therefore, present perfect implies a mixture of at least two
basic temporal segments — past and present, with the situation itself occurring in the past or continuing to the present. That seems to be the reason
why aspectual components in present perfect became more important, that
is notions like result, continuation, repetition up to now etc. Some grammarians even included these notions into the names of some types of present
perfect, for example habit-in-a-period-leading-up-to-the-present or state-upto-the-present (cf. Leech 2004: 39-40).
The main arguments why present perfect should not be included only
into the English tenses relate to the fact that the primary function of present
286
perfect is not to locate events into a specific temporal section - past or present, but to indicate the relevance of a situation for the present moment. It is
a well known fact that present perfect cannot specify the exact past time
when a situation happened, and it does not occur with the specific past
time adverbials like yesterday, last week etc, which is one of the basic features of past tenses. Moreover, present perfect cannot be treated as a typical present tense either, because it does not denote the basic present
meaning - real present, situations going on at the time of speech. The only
typical temporal notions related to present perfect seem to be temporal
continuation (with or without repetition) and temporal recentness (recent
past). Actually, it appears that this finite verb form has the primary function
to denote some (broadly speaking) aspectual or pragmatic notions like current validity of the situation and results significant for the present. In an
attempt to investigate that issue, this paper would discuss the temporal and
aspectual components in a number of examples containing present perfect.
3. English Present Perfect — Corpus Analysis
To discuss the temporal and aspectual components in the English
present perfect, the paper would analyse the corpus compiled from the
contemporary British novel — Nice Work by D. Lodge (Lodge 1989). The
corpus includes 191 examples, 170 of them being nonprogressive (89%) and
21 progressive (10,99%). Numbers in the brackets after the examples
denote the pages in the book.
Several possible clues could be followed in an attempt to specify temporal and aspectual/pragmatic components in the concrete sentences from
the corpus. This paper would start from temporal adverbials used with present perfect and then proceed to aspectual/pragmatic implications.
3.1. Temporal Adverbials and Present Perfect
The nonprogressive present perfect in the corpus is often accompanied by specific temporal adverbials (adverbs, phrases, clauses) which help
to identify temporal relations in the given sentence and to establish the temporal patterns. Such adverbials could be divided into two basic groups:
those denoting immediately preceding events or near past, and those
denoting longer periods of time.
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
The adverbials from the first group typically mentioned in the English
grammar books are recently and just. Examples from the corpus contain
those and the similar adverbials:
(3)
a) This has become a regular occurrence lately: lying
awake in the dark, waiting for the alarm to beep, worrying. (13)
b) She carries the Daily Mail, which has just been delivered.
(20)
c) Vic grunts, unsurprised that his Marketing Director has
not yet arrived. (36)
d) They turn to face Philip Swallow, who has evidently just
arrived, since he is wearing his rather grubby anorak...
(61)
e) ...all talking at once, as if they have just been released
from solitary confinement. (72)
f) I’ve been thinking lately I might try and supplement my
income with a little freelance journalism.’ (187)
g) Oh, while I’m here — you haven’t had a letter from
Rawlison’s buyer lately, by any chance?’ (195)
h) ‘Have you seen Charles recently?’ he asked. (259)
i) Anyway they’ve just discovered that compulsory retirement is unconstitutional... (329)
j) And Euphoric State has just put in a bid to be the home of
a new Institute of Advanced Research on the West Coast.
(359)
k) Haven’t had a reply yet. (363)
The adverbial just (examples 3b, d, e, i, j) clearly indicates the situation
immediately preceding another given situation. The adverbial lately (examples 3a, f, g) is also quite frequently used to denote a larger anterior temporal section, but still within the segment of the relatively near past and with a
possible repetition, as indicated by a prenominal modifier - regular in the
example (3a). The third adverbial from the above-mentioned examples —
yet, (examples 3c, k) could be included in this group, even though it might
imply a longer period preceding the moment of speech; however, the context in these two examples indicates the event which the participants in the
288
situation expected to occur in the relatively near past or as soon as possible.
Finally, the typical adverbial recently (example 3h) also unambiguously indicates near past. Therefore, the typical temporal pattern in these examples
is the situation in the past immediately preceding the point of speech or the
situation belonging to near past.
Moreover, it appears that the examples from the corpus which do
not contain temporal adverbials also indicate immediately preceding situations or near past. For instance:
(4)
a) The pressure of his foot on a wired pad under the staircarpet has triggered the burglar alarm... (18)
b) What has been designated Industry Year has got off to a
predictably silly start. (25)
c) The shrinkage of heavy industry, and the development of
new forms of energy, have reduced the visible pollution
of the air... (32)
d) She wonders why he has invited her into his office. (63)
e) It’s not just the money, though, that has led me to this
decision...(311)
All these examples carry the implication that the situation denoted by
present perfect immediately precedes (4a, b, d, e) or indicates a relatively
near past (4c).
The adverbials from the second group indicate periods of time starting
in the past, but continuing till the moment of speech. For example:
(5)
a) ... his eldest son, who dropped out of university four
months ago and has not been usefully occupied since...
(19)
b) Vic has never been inside the place. (28)
c) But the snow, which has been light in the past half-hour,
suddenly begins to fall fast ... (100)
d) ‘Haven’t we met before?’ he said. (110)
e) ‘He’s been with the company a long time.’ (211)
f) ‘He’s been on the phone to me this morning.’ (263)
g) ...it’s the first accident he’s ever had in twenty-five years’
driving. (304)
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
h) I’ve read more in the last few weeks than in all the years
since I left school,’ he said. (356)
Adverbials like never (5b) and ever (5g) are in the English grammar
books typically related to present perfect, denoting a longer time-span or
the entire life of a participant, and the occurrence or non-occurrence of a
situation during that period of time. The examples (5a, h) illustrate the use
of since, so in all the years since I left school (5h) indicates the beginning of
the time-span and its continuation to the point of speech. Another group of
adverbials denotes a more or less definite period of time preceding the
point of speech (5c, d, e): in the past half-hour, before, a long time. The
example (5f) indicates the realization of a situation within a given period of
time (this morning). The temporal pattern of this group on the one hand
implies continuation from a point or a period in the past till the moment of
speech and the occurrence or non-occurrence of a situation up to now; on
the other, it indicates the occurrence of a situation in a specified temporal
segment.
Finally, here are some examples with the present perfect progressive:
(6)
a) ...like clamorous patients who have been waiting all
night for the doctor’s surgery to open; (41)
b) Although she has been teaching now for some eight
years, on and off, ....she always feels a twinge of anxiety
at the beginning of a new term. (41)
c) All the students, even those who have been staring out of
the window, react to this. (74)
d) The heads of other men present have been swiveling
from side to side, like spectators in a tennis match, during this argument. (76)
e) The students who have been writing everything down
now look up and smile wryly at Robyn Penrose, like victims of a successful hoax. (77)
f) A tradesman who has been ringing at the front door for
several minutes gives up and goes away. (78)
g) Those who have been daydreaming or carving their initials into the desktops sit up. (78)
h) Those who have been taking notes continue to do so
with even greater assiduousness. (78)
290
i) Robyn looks up from the copy of North and South from
which she has been reading this passage, and surveys her
audience with a cool, grey-green eyes. (80)
j) “We’ve been cleaning up the place — I took the opportunity to have the pin-ups taken off the walls.’ (341)
As expected, these examples imply a situation lasting for some time,
which is indicated by the adverbials all night, for some eight years, during
this argument and for several minutes (6a, b, d, f). The examples without
temporal adverbials indicate situations which started in the relatively near
past (6c, e, g, h, i) or at some time in the past (6j). Their temporal pattern is
continuation beginning slightly before the point of speech and lasting till the
point of speech.
3.2. Aspectual/Pragmatic Components
As already pointed out, in addition to the temporal notions, grammar books explain the uses of the present perfect with the help of notions
like relevance, result, experience; these notions are usually included into
the category of aspect, and they could be illustrated by the following examples:
(7)
a) ...one third of all the engineering companies in the West
Midlands have closed down. (33)
b) Here and there an effort has been made at renovation,
but always in deplorable taste...(98)
c) ‘You can’t explain poststructuralism to someone who
hasn’t even discovered traditional humanism.’ (218)
d) I’ve been left behind by the tide of history... (311)
e) ‘What bits have you memorized, then?’ (356)
f) ‘I’ve been living in a dream. This business has woken me
up. (380)
It is difficult to explain the use of the present perfect in these examples
on the basis of the temporal components only, for example to explain the
difference between past nonprogressive and present perfect in these contexts. Thus the examples (7) underline the validity of the situation denoted
by the verb, the significance of that fact for the current discourse, in other
words they have a specific pragmatic implication. For instance, (7b) and
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
(7e) respectively underline recent attempts to achieve something or ask
about recent achievements, while the second clause in (7f) implies a cause
leading to a change of state.
4. Conclusion
This discussion about the temporal and aspectual/pragmatic components of the English present perfect has once more proved the complexity
of this finite verb form: the examples from the corpus have shown that both
temporal and aspectual or pragmatic notions are necessary for a comprehensive explanation of the uses of the present perfect.
As for the temporal patterns, the following were typically found in the
corpus: a) the past situation occurring in the immediate or near past, shortly before the point of speech, and b) a period of time in the past continuing
to the present moment. In the latter case, the period of time could include
the actual continuation of the situation (for example, waiting all night), or
the repetition of a situation during that period or nonexistence of a situation
in a given period (with the adverbial never). Moreover, that period of time
could be specified by an adverbial (e.g. for eight years, since...) or could
encompass the entire lifetime of a participant in the situation.
Aspectual and pragmatic notions are often necessary to distinguish
present perfect from past non-progressive, because it seems that the temporal notions would not suffice for that. Actually, it appears that the essential common denominator for the uses of the present perfect is the speaker’s/writer’s evaluation related to the validity or significance of the situation
viewed from the point of speech.
References
Brinton, L. 1988. The Development of English Aspectual Systems. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Comrie, B. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Comrie, B. 1986. Tense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huddleston, R., G. K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leech, G. 2004. Meaning and the English Verb. London: Longman.
Lodge, D. 1989. Nice Work. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Palmer, F. R. 1989. The English Verb. London: Longman.
Quirk R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, J. Svartvik. 1985. A Grammar of Contemporary
English. London: Longman.
292
Reichenbach, H. 1947. Elements of Symbolic Logic. New York: Free Press.
Thomson, A. J., A. V. Martinet. 1992. A Practical English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
ON DEPICTIVES, MANNER AND TRANSPARENT ADVERBS IN
ENGLISH AND ROMANIAN
DARIA PROTOPOPESCU
University of Bucharest
Abstract: The paper investigates the contrast between VP-adjoined adjectives
(the so-called ‘depictives’) and adverbial forms in English, which is manifest
under the form of minimal pairs: John left sad vs. John left sadly. The two
forms are often difficult to tell apart, in spite of what one might expect.
Following Geuder (2004), the author also makes an attempt at analyzing
Romanian manner and transparent adverbs as well.
1. Preliminaries.
The current paper set out to discuss the difference between two
almost minimal pairs of sentence in English and Romanian where there
arises a contrast between VP-adjoined adjectives (the so-called depictives)
and adverbial forms.
(1)a. Johni left Mary sadi.
b. John left Maryj sadj.
c. Johni left Maryk sadlyi/*k.
In example a) sad is a subject depictive, and the sentence has the
reading where John was sad while leaving Mary. In example (1b) sad is an
object depictive and the sentence has the reading where Mary was sad
while being left by John.
Geuder (2004) has shown that for German (a language with no adverbial morphology) it is difficult to tell the two forms of adjuncts apart. He
shows that the two types of adjuncts are even more closely related to each
other than previously thought due to the existence of what he calls a class
of “transparent” adverbs. He distinguishes them from manner adverbs insofar as these adverbs share with depictives the property of denoting states
and predicating of an individual.
294
For Romanian, the distinction is not so easy to make out since, like in
German, there is little adverbial morphology. Most Romanian adverbs are
derived from the masculine singular form of the corresponding adjective;
therefore, the difference can be clearly captured in case of plural or feminine contexts.
(2)a. Copiii
merg liniºtiþi
Children-THE
walk calm-ADJ masc.pl.
“The children walk to school calmly.”
la
to
b. Copiii
merg liniºtit
Children-THE
walk calm-ADV
“The children walk to school calmly.”
ºcoalã.
school
la
to
ºcoalã.
school
As can be seen, in example (2a) there is agreement with the subject.
Therefore, the interpretation of the sentence is that the children were calm
as they were walking to school, whereas in the (2b) example there is no
agreement, liniºtit “calmly” clearly being an adverb and the interpretation
being that the event of walking to school is performed in a calm manner.
Such pairs of examples frequently arise in Romanian. This is what has probably triggered the ungrammatical use of adverbs with agreement features
by some speakers in case adverbs appear as modifying other adjectives
(Forãscu 2002):
(2)c.*Copii
noi
nãscuþi
Children
new-masc. pl. born-masc. pl.
“Newly born children”
d. *Musafiri
proaspeþi
sosiþi
Guests
fresh-masc. pl. arrived-masc.pl.
“Newly arrived guests”
The distinction between the examples in (1) can be rendered as follows (Geuder 2004: 132):
(3)a.
leave Mary sad
leave (e,x, Mary) & sad (x)
(depictive)
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
b.
leave Mary sadly
leave (e, x, Mary) & sad (e)
(adverb)
The representation of the adverb in (3b) can be taken to be the correct
one for a manner adverb. However, manner adverbs are not the only case
under consideration for the analysis of a distinction between depictives and
adverbs. Geuder (2000: 178) is the first to label a rarely recognized class in
the literature, namely that of “transparent” adverbs, which differ from manner adverbs, but resemble depictives in that they refer to a state of an individual.
To this end, the second section of my paper attempts a semantic discussion of depictives in order to prove that the event variable introduced by
the main verb of a clause is needed to anchor them. This is an essential
property they seem to share with adverbial constructions, i.e. they make reference to an event.
The third section discusses the existence of the class of “transparent”
adverbs, which are, according to Geuder (2000: 179), more than simply
predicates of events — as manner adverbs are. They denote states of their
own and predicate of an individual — which is the holder of the state.
Finally, I shall look into the minimal semantic difference between a
depictive and an adverbial form. I shall also investigate the means by which
we can decide upon their choice, something that appears to be quite difficult in Romanian, given the lack of morphological difference between
depictives and their adverbial counterparts, which in turn may give rise to
confusion.
2. Depictive constructions
Depictive adjectives are traditionally treated as predicates of individuals and have to be anchored to the event variable of the clause. However,
they cannot be just predicates of individuals, because individual level adjectives are in most cases excluded from depictive constructions. In the case
of depictives, one can notice the involvement of the event arguments of
verb and adjective. Depictives do not fit the standard picture of event predication as found with manner adverbs, since they appear in a syntactic position and receive a temporal interpretation, betraying a dependence on the
event argument. Syntactically, they are always adjoined at the VP level,
where we also find event adverbs.
296
Individual level adjectives undeniably show a tendency to enter into
predication structures that only concern the individual (with unselective
binders such as usually: e.g., Cats are usually intelligent). They are excluded from depictive constructions.
2.1. Depictives and syntax
In both English and Romanian, depictives occur invariably in postverbal position. In English they have to follow resultative adjectives and subject
depictives follow object depictives (examples from Geuder 2004: 135)
(4)John kicked the door open tired.
(resultative < subject
depictive)
(5)Murphy hammered the coin flat hot.
(resultative < object depictive)
(6)John ate the meat raw tired.
(object depictive < subject depictive)
(7)a.
Diana [...] îi
privi
cercetãtoare.
Diana […] them-CL-ACC
looked inquisitive-FEM.sg.
“Diana looked at them inquisitive.”
(ªtefan Agopian — Tache de catifea: 78)
b. Studenþii
l
-au
privit iscoditori.
Students-THE him-CL-ACC -have looked inquiring-MASC.pl.
“The students looked at him inquiring.”
c. Studenþii
l
-au
privit iscoditor.
Students-THE
him-CL-ACC
-have looked inquiringly.
“The students looked at him inquiringly.”
The adjectives in (7a) and (7b) are both subject depictives, the meaning of the sentences being: (7a) Diana looked at them and she was inquisitive and (7b) The students looked at him and they were inquiring, whereas
(7c) means that The students looked at him in an inquiring manner.
The ordering in both languages shows that subject and object depictives have to be right-adjoined. The question arises as to where exactly it is
that these subject depictives are adjoined in these two languages.
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
Tests show that they must be attached at the VP-level.
Pseudo-clefting
(8)a. Ceea ce
au
fãcut studenþii
a
fost
What have done students-the
has
been
sã
-l
priveascã
iscoditori / iscoditor.
sã-subjunctive him-CL-ACC
look
inquiring-MASC.-pl/ inquiringly.
“What the students did was to look at him inquiring / inquiringly.”
b. ?Ceea ce studenþii
au
fãcut iscoditori
What
students-the
have done inquiring-MASC.-pl
a
fost
sã
-l
priveascã.
has been sã-subjunctive him-CL-ACC
look.
“What the inquiring students did was to look at him.”
c. Ceea ce au
fãcut studenþii
iscoditor
What
have done students-the
inquiringly
sã
-l
priveascã.
sã-subjunctive
him-CL-ACC
look.
“What the students did inquiringly was to look at him.”
a fost
has been
The fact that (8b) is quirky means that the adjective is not part of the
VP, as seems to be the case with the adverb in (8c), therefore it is safe to
assume that it is VP-adjoined.
Though-movement (for English)
(9)a.
Though John left the room happy, he was not applauded.
b.
?Happy though John left the room, he was not applauded.
Therefore, depictives cannot be stranded by processes that affect VPs;
they also go with the main verb under negation. If they did not, they would
have be expected to attach higher at the IP-level.
(10)
Bill didn’t leave angry at John.
The example in (10) can only be interpreted as Bill wasn’t angry when
he left John and not as Bill, being angry at John, didn’t leave. Therefore,
unlike other right-adjoined elements which are ambiguous in that they can
298
be interpreted inside or outside the scope of interpretation, depictives can
only go with the main verb under negation.
Ernst (2002: 286) notices that manner adverbs can in principle follow
depictives, although they are somewhat marginal and in need of contextual support (e.g. speaking about work in a painter’s studio):
(11) Al sits clothed quietly, but is often agitated when he has to be nude.
Manner adverbs cannot be adjoined higher than the VP when they are
on a left branch, so it is assumed that quietly, is also a VP-adjunct, therefore
the depictive must also be a VP-adjunct.
3. Manner adverbs and transparent adverbs
In what follows, I shall take a closer look at those adverbs which contrast with depictive constructions. It appears that there is a particular lexical
class of adjectives that causes the problem of minimal contrasts: adverbs
that are derived from stative predicates of individuals like sad, angry, etc.
Adjectives like quick that directly qualify properties of events by virtue of
their underlying lexical meaning do not occur in depictive constructions. For
adjectives such as sad and angry, the distinction between depictive and
manner uses is usually quite sharp, because manner adverbs of this type
involve a lexical shift from individual to event predication. Saying that the
manner of some action is “angry” is not the same as ascribing this state to
an individual in the event.
(12)
— How did you manage to make them believe you were a real officer?
— Well, I kept shouting at them all the time real angrily.
The second sentence in (12) contains a manner adverb angrily, which
says that John’s shouting is marked with anger. The context however, leads
one to expect that the predicate angry is not true of John in this situation.
The assertion of the manner adverb concerns a different thing: namely the
type of shouting which was angry — a true property of the event itself. The
manner reading is opaque in general with respect to the property of individuals denoted by the underlying adjective.
(13)a.
Ea
e
inteligentã.
She
is
intelligent-fem.sg.
“She is intelligent.”
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
b. Ea
a
rezolvat
problema
inteligent.
She
has
solved
problem-the
intelligently.
“She has solved the problem intelligently.”
It is worth mentioning that Romanian prefers using adverbs derived
directly from such adjectives. This could also account for the problem mentioned at the beginning of this paper, because, if so many adjectives are also
used as adverbs, people may easily confuse them, yielding such ungrammatical results as the ones in examples (2c) and (2d). Mihai (1963: 210) proposes a classification of adjectives that are also used as manner adverbs.
a. Words that qualify as both adjectives and adverbs: absolut
(absolute(ly)), anume (certain), asemenea (alike), chiar (right), contrar
(contrary), deosebit (special(ly)), deplin (full(y)), direct (direct(ly)), drept
(right, straight), exact (exact(ly)), exclusiv (exclusive(ly)), frumos (beautiful(ly)), greu (difficult / heavy), gros (thick), încet (slow(ly)), legat (tied),
lung (long), mult (much), puþin (little), repede (quick(ly)), scurt (short),
serios (serious(ly)), sigur (certain(ly)), strâmb (crooked), strâns (tight(ly)),
tare (strong(ly) / loud(ly)), uºor (light(ly)), etc.
b. Words that function primarily as adjectives, but may occur as adverbs
as well. This class is much more numerous: adânc (deep(ly)), atent (careful(ly)), automat (automatic(ally)), bucuros (happy / happily), cercetãtor
(inquisitive(ly)), cinstit (honest(ly)), cumplit (terrible / terribly), discret (discreet(ly)), dispreþuitor (scornful(ly)), domol (slow(ly)), dureros (painful(ly)),
elegant (elegant(ly)), elocvent (eloquent(ly)), iscoditor (inquiring(ly)),
încrezãtor (confident(ly)), lacom (greedy / greedily), nãpraznic (sudden(ly)),
nervos (nervous(ly)), sever (severe(ly)), surprinzãtor (surprising(ly)), tainic
(secret(ly)), etc.
The list is much more extensive and very productive and it can go up
to some more 700 adjectives that can function as adverbs as well.
Ernst (2002: 117) makes the distinction in terms of “state reading” of
“mental attitude adverbs”, while Geuder (2004: 178) calls them “transparent
adverbs” a term that we have adopted for our analysis as well.
Ernst (2002: 67) captures the difference in entailments between (14a)
and (14b).
(14)
a. Though her emotions were in a turmoil, she managed to
leave the room calmly.
300
b. Though her emotions were in a turmoil, she calmly had left the
room.
Example (14a) shows the opaqueness of manner adverbs with respect
to their adjectival base: the manner adverb calmly serves to pick out that
manner of the event that is typically connected with calmness on the part of
the agent — but not the preverbal occurrence of calmly from (14b). This is
similar to the traditional distinction of manner versus subject-oriented reading of adverbs, where the interpretation of calmly in (14b) is subject-oriented that is the adverb is taken to assert the state of calm of an individual.
This difference in the readings is correlated with a difference in syntactic position. However, one cannot simply claim that manner adverbs are the
ones in postverbal position, while transparent adverbs are those in preverbal position. Manner adverbs can in principle precede the verb as well (15b)
if there is enough heavy material following the verb or if the verb is passive,
although they preferentially go into the postverbal position.
(15)
a. She walked carefully on the ice.
b. She carefully walked on the ice.
c. She walked carefully.
d. ?She carefully walked.
4. Semantic difference between depictive adjectives and transparent adverbs
Ernst’s (2002: 63-66) classification into “State” and “Intentional”
adverbs roughly corresponds to Geuder’s (2004: 178) “transparent” adverbs:
(16)
a.
Manner: ADV (e) = e [manifests] adj (x), with x =
Agent (e)
b.
State: ADV (e) = e [is accompanied by] ADJ (x),
with x = Agent (e)
c.
Intentional: ADV (e) = e [is intended with] ADJ (x),
with x = Agent (e)
Ernst (2002: 63-66)
The problem with Ernst’s analysis is that he does not assume a semantic difference between depictives and those adverbial forms he subsumes
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
under “state” in (16b); he explicitly states (Ernst 2002:67) that he considers
depictives to have the same representation. However, since depictives and
transparent adverbs cannot be used interchangeably there is a serious
shortcoming.
The existence of a meaning difference between depictives and transparent adverbs can be easily established considering minimal pairs in
which only one of them is permitted. The fact that in certain cases the
depictive is not allowed prompts us to the conclusion that there must be an
interplay between the meaning of the verb and the adjective type which
decides on the acceptability of depictive constructions. To this end, consider the minimal pairs with stage-level adjectives below:
(17) a.
b.
(18) a.
He left angry.
(Geuder’s 2004 examples under 43:148)
He read the review of this book {?angry / ok angrily}
S-
a
întors
de la
ºedinþã
She-refl-ACC-
has
returned
from
meeting
foarte mândrã.
very
proud-fem.-sg.
“She returned from the meeting very proud.”
b.
Ne-a
??mândrã
arãtat pozele
us-has shown pictures-THE
“She showed us the pictures
{??proud
/ ok cu mândrie.
proud-fem.sg. / with pride
/
ok
proudly}”
The verbs leave and return in (17, 18a) seem to be well-suited for
depictive adjuncts; they have a presentational effect, namely a quality of the
subject becomes visible at a certain point. There is no further interaction
between the state and the event. In the (17, 18b) cases, it is easy for one to
assume that there is some kind of connection between the reading of the
review and the anger of the reader, or the showing of the pictures and the
pride of the agent doing that. The fact that in (18b) Romanian prefers the PP
indicating the manner in which the showing occurred is indicative of the
fact that it is this kind of inference (Geuder 2004:148) that makes depictives
unacceptable in these contexts.
302
So far, a safe conclusion would be that the context favouring these
transparent adverbs is that given by the emotional state of the event, and
cases which suggest that the action is brought about by the emotional state:
(19) a.
b.
I angrily forwarded the letter to my solicitor.
Am
have-1sg.
deschis înfometat / cu înfometare
opened hungry / with hunger
frigiderul.
fridge-the.
I opened the fridge hungrily / with hunger.
Another difference between depictives and transparent adverbs is the
fact that depictives can be predicated of both subject and object, whereas
transparent adverbs can only be predicated of the agent, as in example (1c).
This difference can be tracked back to that part in their semantics that distinguishes them: the presence of a dependency relation between state and
event.
5. Conclusions
To sum up, both transparent adverbs and depictives are subject to
restrictions that relate to their interpretation. The difference is that the
adverbs seem to have access to an argument via thematic role information,
while depictives select the target of predication not according to information from event concepts, but rather according to functional conditions.
There is a distinction to be made between manner adverbs and transparent ones to the extent that the former are adjuncts which are predicates
of events, while the latter are adjuncts which denote states of their own. In
English the distinction is between adjuncts that are closely related to the
event (whether they denote separate states or just manners) and adjuncts
without any type of event-dependence (depictives).
Romanian is more ambiguous in this respect, since it is similar to
German to a certain extent, as it exhibits poor morphological distinction
between its depictives and transparent adverbs. Therefore, there is no real
need to impose the categorization of adjuncts found in English due to the
lack of support by morphological distinctions. Transparent adverbs and
depictives may be in principle members of a single, undifferentiated
semantic category.
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
Literary texts
Agopian, ªt. 2004. Tache de catifea. Iaºi: Polirom,
References
Forãscu, N. 2002. Dificultãþi gramaticale ale limbii române [Available online]:
http://www.unibuc.ro/eBooks/filologie/NForascu-DGLR/adverb.htm
Ernst, T. 2002. The Syntax of Adjuncts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Geuder, W. 2004. “Depictives and transparent adverbs”, in Austin, J., Engelberg,
Rauh G. (eds.). Adverbials. The interplay between meaning, context, and syntactic structure. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company, pp. 131-166.
Geuder, W. 2000. Oriented adverbs. Issues in the lexical semantics of event adverbs.
PhD dissertation, Universität Tübingen, [Available online]: http://w210.ub.unituebingen.de/dbt/volltexte/2002/546
Mihai, C. 1963. “Valoarea adverbialã a adjectivelor în limba românã contemporanã”,
in SCL XIV, vol. 2, pp. 209-218.
MACHINES AND TOOLS IN ECONOMIC METAPHORS
ADINA OANA NICOLAE
Petroleum-Gas University, Ploieºti
Abstract: The paper focuses on the interaction between two domains: a source
domain of concrete, physical contact with machines and tools and the target
domain of economic concepts. The qualitative corpus-based analysis of such
metaphorical instantiations is meant to reveal the underlying benefits of this
conceptualization strategy.
Metaphors are not restricted to poetry; they run through all uses of language. Metaphor is also not linguistic as opposed to conceptual, if that
means that language is merely decorative or that it does not express cognitive content. Metaphorical interpretations can not only express cognitive
content, including novel properties, that would not be expressed literally;
they also have cognitive significance — that bears on action as well as
knowledge — by way of their nature.
These are, in a nutshell, the theses the present paper borrows from the
contemporary theory of conceptual metaphor. I also share Lakoff and
Johnson’s belief (1980) in the existence and importance of large-scale systematic networks to which metaphors belong, that uphold their interpretation. One such systematic network is to be delineated in what follows; it
underlies the metaphorical correspondences that are launched by recourse
to the conceptual field of machines and tools.
I take Lakoff and Johnson’s account one step further and look at the
relation between context and metaphorical networks. For Lakoff and his
collaborators the real metaphors are cross-domain mappings; the realizations of conceptual metaphors in language are viewed as linguistic expressions, that is, linguistic types. In my paper, I follow Stern (2000: 179) and take
metaphors never to be expression types per se, but interpretations (or uses)
of expression tokens in contexts, although those interpretations may
depend on the networks or mappings, to which the token belongs. This
context-awareness spares us the peril of providing Lakoff’s example of the
non-metaphorical / literal sentence ‘The balloon went up’; in an adequate
306
context, one could summarize the impact of a stock market run on a vulnerable economy with the same sentence, proving that, contrary to Lakoff et
al.’s belief, there are no expression types per se that are either metaphorical or non-metaphorical.
This insistence on contextual dependency for the identification of
metaphor will become manifest in the presentation of metaphorical linguistic expressions in full sentences or even larger pieces of discourse. The area
of research is restricted to economic discourse and the corpus from which
the samples have been extracted is an extensive business database,
Business Source Complete. It contains full text for more than 8,500 scholarly business journals and other sources, including full text for more than
1,100 peer-reviewed business publications. Its reliability is also enhanced by
its being daily updated.
Corpus linguistics proves particularly useful in providing empirical evidence on which are the target domains informed by the source domain of
machines and tools, and on how conventional or creative particular uses of
language are. The perspective of a corpus of language use in an ESP domain
is valuable, since it is easier to consult samples of language in a functional
domain such as the economic discourse than in language in general. The
corpus approach also fits better with the need for authenticity.
Machinistic views arose very early in the history of human thought;
they developed out of the same effort to understand the unfamiliar via the
familiar which characterizes metaphors. What people hang on in machinistic metaphors is their experience of devising, assembling and using objects
and tools. In time, machinistic metaphors have encompassed a whole
series of technological inventions and innovations, ranging from the wheel,
chain or ladder to complex mechanisms, such as clocks and modern vehicles. This technological record has been transposed in metaphors pertaining to different discourse types, out of which we will single out the economics-centred ones.
Generic concepts in the semantic field of technology are mapped onto
a country’s economy or some parts of it; referentially, the metaphor has the
potential to reify the target entity (economy) and to carry over presuppositions referring to the precision, functionality and maneuverability of the economic system into the target domain. However, the agentivity of the human
operators of the machine or mechanism is at once both hidden (since once
the operational parameters have been set, a machine can go on function-
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
ing) and available for foregrounding (since behind every machine there is,
at least initially, a human agent). Rhetorically then, the metaphor ECONOMY IS A MACHINE has its own pitfalls and manipulative potential.
— ‘Academics have analyzed government policies on entrepreneurship,
but they have tended to share the same underlying beliefs in the function
of entrepreneurs within the economic machine.’
— ‘A well-oiled economic machine.’
— ‘High-tech Crimes and the American Economic Machine.’
— ‘The Japanese economic machine has evolved into a leading world
economy based on per capita income since 1976.’
— ‘Today Japan controls the most sophisticated and successful politicaleconomic machine in the United States.’
— ‘The Exchange Rate Mechanism requires member Governments to
keep the exchange rates of their currencies stable or strong.’
— ‘Adopting a Soviet-style centrally planned system after World War II,
Hungary’s first attempt at comprehensive economic reform began in 1968
with the introduction of the New Economic Mechanism.’
— ‘The competitive mechanism fails in economies with non-convex technologies.’
— ‘The search for alternative mechanisms in economies with increasing
returns was developed and resulted in the principle of marginal cost pricing.’
— ‘Nominal wage contracts and the monetary transmission mechanism.’
— ‘We find a stronger monetary propagation mechanism under a synchronized setting as compared to a staggered setting.’
The metaphor ECONOMY IS A MACHINE also highlights another feature which is frequently associated with machines and economic developments alike, that of motion. The correspondence is so pervasive in economic discourse, that it surfaces in the very names of scholarly business publications, e.g., Review of Economic Dynamics and Journal of Economic
Dynamics and Control’, to name just two. Samples of metaphorical expressions licensed by the motion schema frequently resort to the prototypical
motion image suggested by wheels:
— ‘To the untrained eye, the wheels grind slowly. However, there is a good
deal that can and should be done to improve market share.’
— ‘FDA reform: The wheels grind ever so slowly.’
— ‘They should have set the public relation wheels in motion.’
— ‘The wheels in motion towards a free enterprise system in Cuba.’
308
The focus on motion is complemented by a focus on human agents by
means of verbal phrases such as keep/ set/ get/ put in motion and grease/
oil the wheels:
— ‘It emphasizes on the evaluation of reward and recognition of veteran
professionals who keep the company’s wheels in motion.’
— ‘Internet Firms Grease Wheels of Commerce With Their IPO Shares.’
— ‘Bayerische Motoren Werke AG got its marketing wheels in motion with
a national campaign including print outdoor.’
— ‘Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan set the wheels in motion for
a dollar devaluation in November 2004.’
— ‘Putting telecommunications wheels in motion.’
— ‘How MICEX oils the wheels of the Russian securities boom.’
— ‘The National Bank is also keeping its monopoly of hard currency transactions. There will be no interbank or money market to oil the wheels of
the new banking system.’
— ‘Capitol Hill wheels grind on but financial modernization intricately
intertwined in sprockets.’
Distraction of attention away from human agents is marked by replacing them with generic, inanimate nominal phrases (inflation, oil, evaluations) in:
‘Inflation greases the economy’s wheels by allowing firms in distress to
escape slowly from a commitment to pay high wages so that the economy
avoids a large employment cost.’
‘Oil Fuels Economy.’
‘Evaluations oil the wheels of the industry’
Another basic early tool that is extensively used in metaphorical economic discourse is the chain. That it happens so is not a surprise, if one
associates it with the pre-conceptual link kinesthetic image schema. The
connections between the links in a chain can be anything from contractual
obligations, commonality of purposes, regional affiliation to hierarchical
order.
— ‘5 people I would hire to run my supply chain.’
— ‘Another reader wonders whether it would be appropriate to bypass the
chain of command and talk to their company’s CEO about an incompetent
manager.’
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
— ‘According to Sharon Daniels, CEO of international training and consulting firm AchieveGlobal Ltd., managing up is the ability to communicate up
the chain of command.’
— ‘Co-op Travel chain of shops offers a 5 per cent discount on its summer
travel packages keeping in mind this predicament of the parents.’
— ‘Norwich Union PLC is set to make up to 20 marketers redundant after
closing its high street chain of shops.’
— The estate agents have been the loose link in the chain from a regulatory perspective in the house buying process.’
— ‘Greening of product chains has come up as an important means to systematically improve the environmental performance of products.’
— ‘Corporate governance is often regarded as a weak link in Asia’s company performance.’
— ‘A case can be made for identifying contractors, vendors and suppliers
as potential weak links.’
— ‘Supplier diversity: A missing link in human resource development.’
The image of the ladder is metaphorically mapped onto the ascension
to higher positions in a company, fitting into the metaphorical pattern
CAREER IS AN UPWARD JOURNEY:
— ‘Climbing the corporate ladder.’
— ‘Speak up, get noticed, climb the ladder!’
Other tools that are, we assume, close to the prototypical centre of
their category, are frequently mentioned by virtue of their experiential closeness: the hammer and nails for the decisiveness and strength of the hammering activity, clocks for the precision and exactness of the mechanism,
and key for the crucial role it plays in the activity (opening doors).
— ‘Hammer down your costs.’
— ‘Watching Capitol Hill efforts to hammer out a financial services deregulation bill is like watching a Marx Brothers movie.’
— ‘Tactics to nail down that price.’
— ‘Thomson Scientific Nails Down $7.2 Million Contract.’
— ‘When to Sell and Nail Down Your Profits—While You Still Have Them.’
— ‘Like Clockwork: The Swiss Health Insurance System.’
— ‘Making the risk process run like clockwork.’
— ‘Growing cadre of consultants and managers claim that the key to creating a globally, competitive work force in the 1990’s is empowerment.’
— ‘Replacing key staff members can take a serious toll on your business.
Instead of switching employees like cogs, study and nurture their skills.’
310
A rather less prototypical device, the siphon, is metonymically transferred into the verb to siphon off and then metaphorically applied to money
management, since MONEY is frequently conceptualized as a LIQUID:
— ‘States Siphon Off Bigger Share Of Tobacco-Settlement Money.’
— ‘New government siphons off bad loans.’
— ‘The federal authorities may have missed an opportunity to stop Frankel
early on in his alleged scheme to siphon off assets from struggling insurance companies.’
Another favourite conceptual transfer occurs in the adoption of the
terms lever, leverage, to lever up in the business jargon:
‘Moreover, a chart that shows simulated effects of policy levers to lessen
the insider threat is presented.’
‘Using the described approach, CEOs and employees focus their attention
on the relevant control levers and use their time for interaction and learning rather than control.’
‘Taiwan wants to keep tight control over the expansion of its $3 billion in
indirect trade with China, to use as a bargaining lever in future political
relations.’
‘In addition, the level of financial leverage is not random.’
‘Universal Owners should recognise both their power and their responsibilities, and then leverage their investment strategies to catalyse ESG
improvements in their investee companies.’
‘Clear Channel Communications Inc. filed an updated proxy statement as
part of the radio broadcaster’s effort to win approval for its leveraged buyout.’
‘Firms lever up as opportunities improve to take advantage of tax shields.’
Professional jargon phrases in the field of economics frequently
embrace the all-inclusive vehicle terms tool and instrument:
— ‘Personal selling and personal sales professionals use a number of tools
to develop customer relationships.’
— ‘These marketing tools may prove useful to manage the relationship
with other stakeholders.’
— ‘He likewise suggests the need for agents to have the necessary sales
and marketing tools for their work to progress.’
— ‘The management tools usable for monitoring building O&M contracts
were reviewed.’
— ‘The Tools and Techniques of Change Management.’
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
— ‘The authors signal a growing interest in using CoPs as management
instruments and in governance.’
— ‘The article starts with a brief description of exchange rate risk and the
most relevant risk management instruments.’
— ‘Use of economic instruments in the German renewable electricity policy.’
The pieces and components of machines and machineries are subjected to metaphorical mappings; a notable exception is the term cog,
metonymically standing sometimes for the whole machine, in situations
such as:
— ‘The Cogs of E-commerce.’
— ‘A truly working proposition will oil the cogs of business.’
— ‘Managing Director Paul Hearnden said that first time buyers keep the
cogs of the housing market turning.’
— ‘For example, the liquidity adjustment problem has been largely
ignored in the academic and financial literature. That’s odd, because it’s
the very lubricant that greases the cogs of finance.’
— ‘Though labour and capital are both cogs in the output machinery, what
produces a thriving economy is how efficiently the former uses the latter.’
The human capital is often equated to inanimate machinery components, that is cogs:
— ‘Rather than letting them feel like a dispensable cog in management’s
machine, make the tie-in between good, customer service and repeat
business clear.’
— ‘Since the time of the Industrial Revolution, managers have tended to
view people as tools, while organizations have considered workers as cogs
in a machine.’
— ‘Instead of switching employees like cogs, study and nurture their skills.’
The list of metaphorical patterns could not be complete without the
presence, under the vehicle terms label, of advanced and modern technology items. The range of vehicles reunites trains, cars, ships, planes; their
perceptually salient gestalt images — structured wholes — may be the reason for their selection.
The train analogy allows for derailing and tracks to be carried over into
the domain of economics:
— ‘Four wholesalers bullish despite derailed mergers.’
— ‘Israel’s Economy Is Back on Track.’
312
The automobile analogy conceptually supports gear changes, as in:
— ‘Tif moves up a gear to maximise business value.’
— ‘Europe poised to move up a gear.’
— ‘Market begins to move up a gear.’
— ‘BMW in advertising high gear.’
— ‘The political gears are finally beginning to grind on China trade.’
— ‘Digital marketing steps up a gear.’
It is also worth noticing that one maintains in sharp focus whatever has
direct connection to speed and motion - two cherished concepts in the economic discourse that, as shown before, lend themselves to metaphorical
illustrations. Thus, moving up a gear, speeding up and using the brakes are
common metaphorical phrases:
— ‘U.S. federal regulators are not moving with enough speed to put the
brakes on nontraditional home loans.’
— ‘A Housing Slowdown Can Put the Brakes on a Job Sector but Open
Other Opportunities.’
— ‘Following a quiet summer north of the border, the market for warehousing has started to pick up speed with local companies looking for distribution facilities.’
— ‘China: A Case Of Faulty Brakes.’
— ‘Transport index shows economy hitting the brakes.’
In a similar way, the vehicle hinted at in the examples below is either
a ship or a plane:
— ‘Johnson Controls Steers Away from Autos.’
— ‘We think the auto industry is about to take off.’
Last, but not least, a series of verbal metaphorical mappings owes a lot
to specific human activities which involve specific skills and tools: welding,
forging, sharpening, etc. They implicitly convey the artificiality of the product hereby obtained and of the hard labour aspect of the process:
— ‘Former RealWorld president Kurt Mueffelman is planning a roll up of
value-added resellers that can weld together an organization in the United
States by the middle of 2000.’
— ‘Embedded Linux startup forges ahead with new CEO.’
— ‘Pantone, Clariant Forge Partnership.’
— ‘Japan revs up drive to forge free-trade agreements.’
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
— ‘Lead firms sharpen up their act.’
— ‘The insurance industry needs to sharpen its recruiting and retaining
skills’.
— ‘Furthermore, IFF aims to sharpen its focus and accountability across
the organization and speed its growth.’
Instead of allowing its context-dependence to be an obstacle to its
semantic candidacy, I assumed that the very key to a satisfactory semantic
analysis is to embrace the metaphor’s context-dependence. Within the cognitive semantic framework, the analysis has revealed some of the basic
metaphorical patterns in which the conceptual domain of machines and
tools has offered the input material. The remarks on the metaphors motivating the corpus metaphorical expressions point to the considerable applicability of the source domain. If one tries to explain this applicability, it can be
suggested that the clue may lie in the immediate experiential availability of
the domain of tools and machines, their indispensability and perceptual
salience. This observation strengthens previous conclusions regarding the
promotion of concrete conceptual domains to the status of source domains
in conceptual metaphors, provided that they are of utmost concern and
interest to the speakers of a language.
I may therefore hope that the interaction between corpus linguistics
and cognitive linguistics has provided a valuable insight into the workings of
metaphors.
References
Business Source Complete {online}. Available at http://www.ebsco.com/ [2007, April 27]
Lakoff, G., Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Stern, J. 2000. Metaphor in Context. Cambridge, Mass., London: The MIT Press.
HIS COCKLE HAT
HORTENSIA PÂRLOG
Abstract: After WWII, an intense activity of translation started in Romania and
a great number of masterpieces of world literature - among which
Shakespeare’s sonnets and all of his plays - came to be rendered into
Romanian. The paper comments upon several translations of “Hamlet”,
probably Shakespeare’s play most translated into the language, pointing out
several problems caused by certain peculiarities typical of each culture
(concerning religion, mediaeval theatre, terms of address, hunting, folklore,
etc.) and discussing the solutions found.
Introduction
Any text may contain terms that are culturally marked — terms that
refer to customs, beliefs, food, clothing, money, characters in well-known
(fairy-)stories, etc. A translator should be able to correlate the rules of usage
of one culture with those of another culture.
Commenting on Malinowki’s work, Hatim and Mason (1990: 36–37)
point out that in order to make the results of his studies known to the
English public, the anthropologist translated Melanesian texts into English,
and provided commentaries on the translation, in an attempt to bridge the
gap between the two cultures. He was aware that he had to „‘situationalize‘
the text“ and that the cultural context was „crucial in the interpretation of
the message, taking in a variety of factors ranging from the ritualistic (which
assumes great importance in traditional societies), to the most practical
aspects of day-to-day existence“ (Hatim, Mason 1990: 37). This was to be
called later ‘domestication’ by Venuti (1995: 19–21), who believes that many
translations are „fundamentally ethnocentric“ (1995: 93): the source language text is altered in the translation process, in order to fit the level of
understanding of the target culture readers. The translator must apply a
„culture filter“ (House 1997: 114), which sometimes may bring about a
change of the text. When this is not done, the text may prove difficult to
understand. I shall give two examples, taken from Hamlet, to support this
last statement:
316
(1) (…) or else shall ‘a suffer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse, whose
epitaph is ‘For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot’ (III, 2, 127 — 130)
The translated text, which speaks about a wooden horse, is meaningless to the Romanian reader, as none of the translators make any significant
change in it (the hobby-horse was a figure in the country dances during the
May games, no longer popular):
Cãci altminteri l-aºteaptã soarta calului de lemn [‘the fate of the wooden
horse’], al cãrui epitaf e: „Saltã, saltã, cãluþ de lemn, [‘little wooden horse’]
uitat de toatã lumea” (Streinu)
Altminteri, o sã aibã parte de uitarea tuturora, la fel cu calul de lemn
[‘wooden horse’], care poartã epitaful: Vai! Vai! Uitat e bietul cãluºel! [‘little wooden horse’] (Dumitriu, 1955, 1959)
Banuº-Cãlin (1948) only add a supplementary element, an explanation
suggesting that the ‘hobby horse’ is some toy or character in a story or fairytale:
(…) cãci altfel va cãdea în uitare, asemenea cãluþului de lemn din
poveste [‘like the wooden horse in the tale’], pe mormântul cãruia stã
scris ‘Dar vai, dar vai, cãluþul de lemn e uitat’
(2) Bring me to him. Hide fox, and all after. (IV, 2, 30)
Duce-mã-þi la el. La vizuinã vulpe ºi toþi dupã ea. (Streinu)
Duceþi-mã la el. Ascunde-te, vulpe, ºi hai cu toþii dupã tine. (BanuºCãlin)
Readers have no idea that ‘hide, fox’ is a children’s game, a kind of
hide-and-seek, and can see absolutely no connection between a fox and
Hamlet’s attempt to hide Polonius’ body; they may simply interpret vulpe
[‘fox’] as an appellative for Polonius (smarter ones might make a connection between Polonius’ position at the court of King Claudius and a fox’s
deceitful nature).
As Gutt (2000: 238) points out, „[...] language differences are only one
of the barriers that stand in the way of communication across languages;
the other, and sometimes more formidable, barrier is that of differences in
contextual background knowledge“.
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
In what follows I shall mainly present several instances of ethnocentrism found in five post-WWII translations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, commenting briefly upon the translator’s interventions in the text. The translation of some of the lines may also have been influenced by the ideology
dominant at the time.
The translations examined are the following: Banuº-Cãlin (1949),
Dumitriu (1955, 1959), Leviþchi-Duþescu (1964), Streinu (1965).
2. Instances of ethnocentrism
2.1. Terms of address: My lord, sir
When addressing Hamlet, the characters in the play often use the formal, polite noun phrase my lord or variations of it, containing also a modifier: my honour’d lord, my most dear lord, sweet lord. My lord may become
milord in the Romanian versions or lord Hamlet or simply (and totally inappropriately) Hamlet, or it is translated as stãpâne [‘master’] (a rather generic term, for someone who has property and employees or people who serve
or work for him, but does not necessarily refer to a nobleman), alteþã [‘your
highness’] or prinþ [‘prince’], which are correct equivalents, since Hamlet is
a prince. Quite often, my lord is translated as mãria-ta or doamne, the
vocative of domn; both forms of address were commonly used in
Romanian to address the rulers or voivodes of Moldavia and Wallachia
(before the 20th century):
e.g., H. Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Oph. No, my lord. (III, 2, 108-109)
— Domniþã, mã pot culca în poala ta?
— Nu mãria-ta. (Dum. 1955, 1959)
Hor. What does this mean, my lord?
— Mãria-ta, ce-nseamnã asta? (Dum, 1955, 1959)
Hor. Here, sweet lord, at your service. (III, 2, 51)
— Aici sunt, doamne bun, sã te slujesc. (Lev.-D)
Mãria-ta is also frequently employed as an equivalent of sir:
e.g., 1 Play. I hope we have reform’d that indifferently with us, sir. (III, 2,
35)
318
Nãdãjduiesc, mãria-ta, cã noi am îndreptat oarecum cusurul ãsta.
(Dum. 1959)
Trag nãdejde, mãria ta, cã, în ce ne priveºte, am îndreptat cât de cât acest
cusur. (Lev- D)
Other words that make reference to Hamlet are rendered into
Romanian as mãria-ta in its genitive / dative form:
e.g.,
All. Our duty to your honour.
H. Your loves, as mine to you; farewell. (I, 2, 253 — 254)
Supuºi mãriei-tale.
Din inimã, prieteni, bun rãmas. (Dum. 1955, 1959)
Hor. Hail to your lordship. (I, 2, 159)
Mã-nchin mãriei tale. (Dum. 1955, 1959)
Hor. Here, sweet lord, at your service. (III, 2, 51)
Aici sunt, stãpâne drag, la porunca mãriei tale. (Dum. 1955).
On occasion, however, the terms of address remain untranslated,
probably for emphasis or in order to show deference, or, perhaps, to suggest irony:
Ham. Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Oph. No, my lord. (III, 2, 108 — 109)
Sã stau, my lady, în poala dumitale?
A, nu, my lord. (Streinu)
Pol. The actors are come hither, my lord. (II, 2, 419)
Actorii au venit, my lord. (Streinu)
Ham. Come on, sir.
Laer. Come, my lord. (V, 2, 272)
Hai, sir.
Hai, prinþe! (Lev.-D.)
Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you. (III, 4, 216; Hamlet addresses
Polonius’s corpse)
Hai, sir, sã mântui treaba ºi cu tine. (Lev.-D.)
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
2.2. Social class
• There is no ancient gentleman but gard’ners, ditchers, and grave
makers. (V, 1, 28 — 30)
For the communist ideology, a line like this, which stated the superiority of the hard-working people over other social classes, was a goldmine to
be exploited. Dimitriu (1955, 1959) translates ditchers as „muncitorul cu
sapa“ [„the worker that uses a spade“], i.e. a specific term is replaced by a
more general word, which at the time had highly positive political connotations:
Nici nu-i pe lume nobil mai de soi decât grãdinarul, muncitorul cu sapa ºi
groparul.
Gentleman, a dated general term for a man of wealth and social position, is translated by Leviþchi-Duþescu with the help of a marked term, boier
[„boyar“], defined by a dictionary (DLRC 1955) as „a representative of the
exploiting classes” who owned land and held a high position in the state, a
person of noble descent:
Boieri de neam vechi sunt numai grãdinarii, sãpãtorii de pãmânt ºi
groparii.
Ideology, I think, also influences the translation of the following lines:
• Let me be no assistant for a state,
But keep a farm and carters. (II, 2, 165-166)
The translators avoid giving a word by word translation of keep a farm,
since at the time the word fermã [„farm“] had suffered a narrowing of
meaning, and was defined by dictionaries as „a socialist agricultural unit,
which is part of an agricultural cooperative, has permanent employees, and
usually grows animals“ (DLRM 1955, my transl.). Consequently, Dumitriu
makes use of a shift and replaces the collocation by a single, „positively“
marked noun, plugar, a „ploughman, land-worker“, a word that was also
employed as a synonym for „peasant“:
Mã las de sfetnicie ºi mã fac
Plugar ºi cãruþaº (Dum, 1955, 1959)
320
2.3. Greeting and parting terms
• A greeting like salut (a kind of „hi“) is used mainly by males in informal settings, or jocularly by females, and suggests a relation of equality or
friendship; therefore it is inappropriate when addressing someone in a higher position or when associated with a term of address used for nobility:
Hor. Hail to your lordship. (I, 2, 159)
Salut, milord. (Lev.- D.)
We have here a mixing of registers: Horatio and Hamlet may have
been colleagues in Wittenberg, but throughout the play, the attitude of the
former towards Hamlet is one of reverence, which is hardly suggested by
salut.
• The leave-taking interjection farewell has several equivalents in
Romanian: rãmas bun, rãmâi cu bine, cu bine, adio, drum bun. One of the
translations uses the phrase mergi sãnãtos [‘go in good health’]; the phrase
is still employed mainly in the country-side:
Ham. Your loves, as mine to you; farewell. (I, 2, 254)
- Dragostea mea vã însoþeºte. Mergeþi sãnãtoºi. (Ban.-C.)
2.4. Religious customs
The translations analysed make frequent references to Romanian religious customs.
• The stage directions given in act V, scene 1 (between lines 211-215)
differ in the various editions of the play. I have three variants:
— Enter the King, Queen, Laertes, in funeral procession after the coffin,
with Priest and Lords attendant. (Peter Alexander (ed.)., 1966 (1951));
— Enter bearers with a coffin, the King and Queen, Laertes and other
Lords, a Priest following. (G. B. Harrison (ed.), 1966 (1937);
— Enter Priests, & c., in procession; the Corpse of Ophelia, Laertes
and Mourners following; King, Queen, their Trains, etc. (Jules Derocquigny,
1936; an English edition printed in Romania, 1978; in this last volume, it is
stated that the plays are presented as they appear in the First Folio of 1623).
Four of the Romanian translations examined follow the third variant.
Mourners is translated as „bocitoare“ by Dumitriu („Intrã o procesiune de
321
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
preoþi, trupul Ofeliei purtat în sicriu deschis, urmat de Laertes ºi de bocitoare“, 1955, „Intrã un alai de preoþi. Trupul Ofeliei purtat în sicriu deschis
urmat de Laertes ºi de bocitoare“, 1959). Bocitoare is a woman, usually a
widow, who wails at funerals; she is either a relative of the dead person or
is specially paid by the relatives in order to cry and lament over the dead
body in a loud voice. This is customary mainly (but not only!) in the countryside, especially in the Southern and Eastern parts of Romania. Notice also
the explanations that Dumitriu gives about „the corpse of Ophelia“: he
makes it clear that Ophelia was taken to her grave in an open, not sealed
coffin (although the word itself does not appear in the original; I do not
know what & c stands for — “and company?”); this again is typical of these
regions.
We should profane the service of the dead
To sing sage requiem and such rest to her
As to peace-parted souls. (V, 1, 230-231)
Requiem is a piece of music, a song sung at burials, or the mass for a
person who has recently died. Banuº-Cãlin translate it as „veºnicã
pomenire” [‘memory eternal’]: „Am pângãri slujba înmormântãrii dacã iam cânta o veºnicã pomenire, aºa cum cântãm sufletelor ce mor împãcat“.
Veºnicã pomenire is a song that ends the service for the dead or for the
commemoration of the dead). Other translators use prohod for „requiem“:
Ar fi sã pângãrim sfinþita slujbã
A morþilor, de i-am cânta prohodul
Ca celor duºi cu sufletu-mpãcat (Dum. 1955)
E slujba morþilor ºi-am pângãrit-o,
Cântându-i ei prohodul ce se cântã
Doar celor morþi cu sufletu-mpãcat. (Dum. 1959)
Prohod is the word for the whole burial service; the collocation a cânta
prohodul is unacceptable, since the service for the dead does not consist of
songs only, from the beginning to the end (the prohod is officiated or celebrated - ‘se slujeºte’).
322
• Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin
Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account. (I, 5, 76 — 78)
The meaning of the word unhouseled, „without being given the
Eucharist“, is explained in some of the Romanian translations through
expansion, with the help of two words that refer to the two connected steps
of this religious ritual: nespovedit [‘without having confessed one’s sins’]
and neîmpãrtãºit [‘without receiving the Eucharist’]:
Am fost smuls din vieaþã atunci când înfloresc pãcatele, nespovedit,
neuns, neîmpãrtãºit... (Ban.-C.)
M-am stins nespovedit, ne-mpãrtãºit,
Cu ordia de nedesãvârºiri
ªi de pãcate-n pârg. (Lev-D)
Dumitriu (1955, 1959) leaves out any reference to the Eucharist:
ªi m-a trimis neuns, nespovedit,
Nepregãtit, la marea judecatã.
Unaneled („not anointed“, „without the extreme unction“) remains
either untranslated (Leviþchi-Duþescu) or, as seen above (Banuº-Cãlin,
Dumitriu), it is rendered with the help of a rather neutral word: neuns
(„unoiled“), which may have several meanings (not necessarily religious).
Romanian has a special word for this religious ritual, borrowed from Slavic:
nemiruit (a semantically negative adjective, derived from the participle of
the verb a mirui), which none of the translators makes use of.
Streinu avoids the translation of the words that refer to the Eucharist
and to anointing, and employs just one term, maslu (another religious word
of Slavic origin); this is a religious service officiated for a seriously ill person,
in the hope that it will be of help for his/her recovery:
Curmat în floarea negrului pãcat,
Nici maslu zis ºi, mai mult, nici grijit,
Zvârlit bicisnic marelui judeþ.
• I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it outherods Herod. (III, 2, 15-17)
323
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
There are several known Herods, all connected to biblical events (the
Herod who had the boys who were two years old and under killed in
Bethlehem, in the hope that Jesus would be killed too; his son, tetrarch of
Galilee, who beheaded John the Baptist and took part in the trial of Jesus;
his grandson, king of Judea, who killed James, and arrested Peter). To probably avoid the religious reference, Banuº-Cãlin replace Herod with Caesar
(„Cezar“), which may be taken both as a proper name and as a common
noun (the title given to Roman emperors):
Pe aºa unul l-aº bicui pentru aerele lui înfumurate; asta înseamnã sã fii
mai Cezar decât Cezarul.
All the other translators use the Romanian Irod for Herod. Dumitriu
(1955, 1959), however, makes an explanatory addition: „pe unul ca ãsta, ce
se crede mai grozav decât Termagant ºi mai Irod decât Irod-Împãrat
[‘Herod, the Emperor’], aº pune sã-l batã cu biciul“. (It is interesting that neither he nor the others felt the need to explain who Termagant was — a violent character in morality plays, unknown to Romanians, on whom the relevance of the text in which the name appears is thus lost).
2.5. Beliefs
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm
So hallowed and so gracious is that time. (I, 1, 163)
The Romanian for fairy is „zânã“ (a good character), and for witch „vrãjitoare“ (most often a bad character). Banuº-Cãlin and Streinu translate
the latter as iele, a word also employed by Dumitriu (1955, 1959) for the former:
Nici farmece de zânã, nici vrãji de iele, atât e ceasul de sfinþit ºi plin de har.
(Banuº-Cãlin)
Nici vrãji nu leagã, nici nu umblã iele;
Sînt nopþi de sfîntã rouã ºi iertare. (Streinu)
Nici iele nu pândesc, nici vrãjitoare;
Atât de plin de har ºi sfânt e ceasul. (Dumitriu, 1955, 1959)
324
In the Romanian mythology, the iele are supernatural female beings,
who are beautiful, very seductive, have long hair and magical powers; they
make their appearance mostly at night, in the moonlight, and usually dance
naked or covered by some transparent veils; they are usually good, unless
offended or seen while dancing. (iele is not a name proper, but the pronunciation of the third person, plural, feminine, of the personal pronoun ele
[jele] („they“); around the country, they are known under a fairly great number of other names).
Leviþchi-Duþescu use just one word for both fairy and witch: „hârcã“.
In Romanian fairy tales, a „hârcã“ is an old, ugly, bad woman, with supernatural powers:
ªi nu fac hârcele solomonii. —
Atât de sfânt ºi milostiv e ceasul. (Lev.-D)
2.6. Popular drama
Ham. A king of shreds and patches. (III, 4, 102)
What Hamlet means to say with these words is that Claudius is a fake,
a worthless king. This is translated into French by Jules Derocquigny „un
paillasse de roi“, i.e. a clown; the word is derived in French from the Italian
Pagliaccio, a character of the Italian popular theatre.
Three of the Romanian translations are almost literal: „Un rege fãcut
din sdrenþe ºi petice“ (Banuº-Cãlin); „Un rege din fâºii ºi zdrenþe“
(Leviþchi-Duþescu); „Un rege slut, de petice“ (Streinu). This might make
sense, in a way, to people of my generation: as children, after WWII, we
would make puppets out of rags and scraps of cloth.
Dumitriu suggests Claudius’ lack of genuineness by making reference
to a Romanian folk drama about the birth of Jesus, known by the name of
Vicleim (a corruption of Bethlehem) in Wallachia. This used to be played in
the country side, at Christmas time, by lads dressed up, according to their
imagination, as kings (the magi) and as Herod (the latter confessing in the
end that he was powerless in the face of Jesus):
Un rege de Vicleim, în petice ºi zdrenþe (1955) [‘a Vicleim type of king’]
Un rege peticit, de Vicleim (1959)
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LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
2.7. Artefacts
• Cockle hat, sandal
Oph. How should I your true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff
And his sandal shoon. (IV, 5, 23 — 26)
Footnotes or endnotes to some of the editions of the play tell us that
pilgrims who had visited the shrine of St. James of Compostella wore a
cockle shell in their hats (Harrison 1966:177) and that shoon is an old plural
for shoe.
In two of the five translations, cockle shell is given the correspondent
scoici [‘shells’] or melc [‘snail’, an animal that also has a shell on its back];
in Romania, however, nobody in their right mind would adorn their hats in
this way and this association of words is probably simply interpreted as
pointing further to Ophelia’s utter madness; notice also the use of the word
ºapcã (a peaked cap, worn by the workers or the military) for hat:
Fiind cu alþii, care-i semnul
Iubitului tãu drag?
El poarta-un melc la pãlãrie,
Sandale ºi toiag. (Streinu)
Cum pot eu sã-l recunosc
Pe iubitul dumitale?
Dupã ºapca lui cu scoici
Dupã cârjã ºi sandale? (Lev-D)
Dumitriu (1955) offers another solution, which would make more
sense to the Romanian readers:
Cine-i vieþii tale drag
Þi-l ghicesc dupã toiag,
Dupã cuºma-i cu mãrgele
ªi-încãlþarea de opincele. (Dum.55)
Cuºmã is a regional word for the fur hat/cap worn in the countryside
in Moldavia, Bucovina, and Transylvania; sometimes such fur caps are
326
adorned with coloured beads [‘mãrgele’]. Opincele is an unusual plural
diminutive of opincã, probably created on purpose in order to rhyme with
mãrgele [‘beads’]; opincã is a Romanian peasant’s sandal (made up of a
rectangular piece of leather sewn after the form of one’s foot, and tied with
leather or woollen strings, which are then wrapped around one’s ankle).
Dumitriu 1959 changes the last two lines and replaces cuºmã with
tichie: „ªi tichia cu mãrgele / ªi-ncãlþãri cu floricele“. Tichie is a cap or bonnet without brims that covers only the top of the head; the word occurs in a
well-known Romanian saying: Ce-i lipseºte chelului? Tichie de mãrgãritar
(„What does the bald man need? A cap of pearls“ — said ironically about
someone who is in need of basic things, but covets or runs after useless
things).
Sometimes a peasant’s hat or fur-cap is adorned with a feather, as
seen in the following translation:
Cum s-aleg din toþi flãcãii
Cel mai credincios ºi drag?
Dupã pana pãlãriei
Sau sandale ºi toiag? (Ban-Cãl.)
In both his translations (1955, 1959), Dumitriu uses the generic term
încãlþãri (usually a pluralia tantum noun), a regional word for „footwear“; a
peasant would not wear sandals / „sandale“, in the modern acceptation of
the word.
• And where the’offence is, let the great axe fall. (IV, 5, 214)
Axe is translated as ‘secure’ in most of the Romanian versions, a synonym of ‘topor’, the difference between the two lying in the size and shape
of the blade. Leviþchi-Duþescu use a different word for a specific type of axe,
baltag, a small, light axe, which in folk poetry is an outlaw’s weapon (it is
also the title of a well-known novel by a famous Romanian writer, M.
Sadoveanu); while secure and topor serve mainly for cutting wood, baltag
is defined in dictionaries as a weapon, used by shepherds and villagers:
Unde-i jignire
Sã se abatã marele baltag!
The collocation used („marele [‘the big’] baltag“) is inappropriate, as
the size of a baltag is small.
• Go, get thee to Yaughan; fetch me a stoup of liquor. (V, 1, 60)
327
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
Stoup (an archaic word) is a large vessel with handle, spout, and lid,
for holding liquor at table. Taking into account what is customary for
Romanian grave diggers to drink, all translators assumed that liquor referred
to spirits, namely, to plum (or other fruit) brandy, and, except for one, they
all gave stoup a Romanian equivalent that denotes a glass recipient varying
in size and shape and would allow association with hard liquor:
Adã un ºip de rachiu (Dumitriu 1959)
Adã-mi o sticluþã de rachiu (Leviþchi-Duþescu)
Adu-mi un clondir de drojdie (Streinu)
Dumitriu (1955), however, uses the word canã („mug“ — a container
with handle for liquids, but not for hard liquor):
Adã o canã de rachiu.
I wonder whether the liquor that Shakespeare had in mind was not
simply ale or beer (o canã de bere).
May I also add that the proper name Yaughan, which is obscure for the
Romanian reader, is taken over in Streinu („Hai, du-te la Yaughan“), is taken
over and explicated by Leviþchi-Duþescu, who use a Romanian regional
word for pub („Hai, du-te la crâºma lui Yaughan“), and is left out and
replaced by a word denoting the place that bears this name in Banuº-Cãlin
(„ªi acum repede-te pânã la cârciumã“) and in Dumitriu 1955, 1959 („Hai,
du-te pân’ la cârciumã“).
• What, frighted with false fire! (III, 2, 260)
Dumitriu (1955, 1959) chooses to translate this noun phrase as „Cum?
Se sperie de un foc de paie?“ [‘a flash in the pan’; a fire that does not last
very long].
Banuº-Cãlin (1948, the first translation after the war) think of a different solution:
Cum? S-a speriat de gloanþe oarbe? [‘was he frightened by blank cartridges?’]
It is, I think, unnecessary to point out that blank or dummy cartridges
did not exist in Hamlet’s time.
328
3. Conclusion
Translation theorists usually speak of „either / or“ translation strategies
used in a text, illustrating their statements with convincing passages taken
from the translation of a given source text. The translator of a piece of work,
however, does not use a coherent strategy in the process of translation, but
applies a variety of solutions: for instance, as seen in the examples given
above, one may indeed come across many cases of „domestication“ of the
text, but „foreignization“ is also present (e.g. see the use of the English,
untranslated forms of address). At the same time, one and the same strategy is used in a variety of ways: the „filtre“ may be applied totally or only partially, because the text may not always lend itself to a total ethnocentric or
a total ideological interpretation. A lot depends on the translators themselves — on their background, on their thorough knowledge of the two languages, of the culture from which they are translating, in one word, on their
professionalism.
References
Gutt, E. A. 2000. Translation and Relevance. Cognition and Context. Manchester: St.
Jerome Publishing.
Hatim, B. and I. Mason. 1990. Discourse and the Translator. London and New York:
Longman.
House, J. 1997. Translation Quality Assessment: A Model Revisited. Tübingen: Gunter
Narr.
Venuti, L. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and
DLRC.1955. Dicþionarul limbii române literare contemporane, vol. I — IV. Bucureºti:
Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Române.
Sources
Banuº — Cãlin.1948. W. Shakespeare. Hamlet. Dramã în 5 acte. Traducere: Maria
Banuº ºi Vera Cãlin. Editura de Stat.
Dumitriu. 1955. Shakespeare. Hamlet. Prinþ al Danemarcei. Tragedie. În româneºte
de Petru Dumitriu. Editura de stat pentru literaturã ºi artã.
Dumitriu.1959. Hamlet, Prinþ al Danemarcei. În româneºte de Petru Dumitriu. In
William Shakespeare, Opere, vol. VII. Bucureºti: Editura de stat pentru literaturã ºi artã.
329
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
Leviþchi-Duþescu. 1964. Hamlet, Prinþ al Danemarcei. În româneºte de Leon Leviþchi
ºi Dan Duþescu. In William Shakespeare. Teatru. Bucureºti: Editura pentru literaturã universalã.
Streinu. 1965. William Shakespeare. Tragedia lui Hamlet, Prinþ de Danemarca. Text
anglo-român, îngrijit ºi tradus, cu o Prefaþã, o Introducere, Note ºi Comentarii
de Vladimir Streinu. Bucureºti: Editura pentru literaturã.
Alexander (ed.). 1966 (1951). William Shakespeare. The Complete Works. Peter
Alexander (ed.). London & Glasgow: Collins.
Derocquigny. 1936. La tragedie de Hamlet, Prince de Danemark. Traduction de Jules
Derocquigny, Paris: Edité par la Société „Les Belles Lettres”.
Harrison (ed.). 1966 (1937). The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. G. B.
Harrison (ed.) Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Romanian edition. 1978. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Abbey
Library. Cresta House, London. Printed in Romania.
CONTEXTUAL ASSUMPTIONS AND THE TRANSLATOR’S
STRATEGY. A CASE STUDY
ALBERT VERMES
Eszterházy Károly College, Eger
Abstract: The paper presents the results of an analysis of the Hungarian
translation of Nick Hornby’s novel Fever Pitch. Its aim is to find out whether the
translator had a consistent strategy in tackling problems of interpretation for
the target reader arising from the differences between source and target
readers’ cognitive environments.
1. Introduction
The paper analyzes the Hungarian translation of Nick Hornby’s novel
Fever Pitch and aims to answer the question whether the translator had a
coherent strategy for handling problems of interpretation arising from the
existing differences between the source and the target readers’ cognitive
environments, and if yes, what that strategy was. The following examples
will serve to illustrate the problem. The expressions in question are written
in italics, page numbers are given in a parenthesis, after the text.
(1) … the games master was a Welshman who once memorably tried to
ban us from kicking a round ball even when we got home (22) → … a tornatanárunk, egy walesi fickó egyszer emlékezetes módon meg akarta
tiltani nekünk, hogy akár csak iskola után is gömbölyú´ labdával játsszunk*
* A walesiek közismerten rögbipártiak; a gömbölyú´ futball-labdával szemben a rögbilabda tojásdad alakú. A szerk. megjegyzése. [footnote] (21)
The noun phrase a round ball is translated literally and is explained in
a footnote (by the editor): “The Welsh are known for their preference for
rugby; as opposed to the round ball used in football, the rugby ball has an
odd shape.”
(2) black-framed Brains-style National Health reading glasses (54) →
fekete keretes Brains-féle esztéká olvasószemüveg (62)
The noun phrase National Health is substituted here by the colloquial
name of the Hungarian counterpart of the British institution.
332
(3) Although the temptation to plunge into a warm bath containing dissolved essence of Kenneth Wolstenholme is always with me… (29) → Bár
mindig eró´s a kísértés, hogy beleüljek egy forró kádba, amely Kenneth
Wolstenholme szétolvadt esszenciájával van tele… (29)
Here again we find a literal translation, this time without an explanation of who or what Kenneth Wolstenholme was — a name that the average Hungarian reader is not very likely to be familiar with.
(4) From NW3 to N17 (174) → Csak szurkoló (212)
In this case, the translation (“only a fan”) completely modifies the
meaning of the original expression.
These four examples exhibit four different solutions, suggesting that
the translator had no strategy for treating cognitive differences. However, to
validate or to refute this initial hypothesis, we will have to take a closer look
at the translation.
2. Method
The expressions collected from the novel and their translation were
sorted into four categories, depending on the semantic relation that holds
between the original and its Hungarian correspondent. Four such relations
(or translation operations) are distinguished: total transfer (TT), logical
transfer (LT), encyclopaedic transfer (ET) and zero transfer (ZT). These relations are defined by the four possible configurations of the logical (L) and
encyclopaedic (E) entries associated with lexical items in relevance theory
(Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995), based on which elements of the semantic
content of the original are preserved in the translation.
The four relations are as follows:
— TT [+L, +E]: the target language item has the same relevant logical
and encyclopaedic content as the original;
— LT [+L, -E]: the TL item has the same relevant logical content as the
original, but the encyclopaedic content is different;
— ET [-L, +E]: the TL item has the same relevant encyclopaedic content as the original, but the logical content is different;
— ZT [-L, -E]: the TL item is different from the original both in terms of
its relevant logical and encyclopaedic content.
333
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
These relations can be illustrated with the following examples from the
text:
TT: (5) the Heysel tragedy (55) → a Heysel stadionbeli tragédia (63) [back
translation: the tragedy in Heysel stadium]. The name Heysel has no logical content, but is associated with the encyclopaedic information that it is
the name of a football stadium. This information is explicated by the translator, obviously on the assumption that the target readers have no ready
access to this information in their cognitive environments.
LT: (6) Rumbelows Cup (39) → Rumbelows kupa (43) [Rumbelows Cup].
The logical content of the original is preserved but the encyclopaedic content, though not readily accessible to Hungarian readers, is not explicated.
ET: (7) on the 5.35 from Paddington (60) → az 5.35-ös vonaton (70) [on the
5.35 train]. The logical content of the original is modified, while the encyclopaedic content is explicated.
ZT: (8) squirm through a packed Dell (42) → elvergó´döm (47) [I squirm
through]. Here both the logical and the encyclopaedic content of the italicised expression are lost in the translation.
What we want to see, then, is what solution the translator employs to
bridge the distance between the cognitive environments of the source and
the target readers when the interpretation of an expression requires access
to a background assumption that is missing from the target readers’ cognitive environment. It easy to see that the missing background assumptions
can be made accessible for the target reader with the help of TT or ET, while
LT or ZT do not aid the target reader in reconstructing the relevant encyclopaedic content. Thus an essential difference between TT and ET, on the
one hand, and LT and ZT, on the other, is that the former two enable the target reader to reproduce the informative intention of the author with less
processing effort, whereas in the case of the latter two, the reader does not
get help to activate the encyclopaedic content and thus a greater amount of
processing effort will become necessary.
3. Results
Table 1. Numerical results
TT
ET
8
19
TOTAL
27
LT
57
ZT
12
69
TOTAL
96
334
The numerical results are presented in Table 1. It can be seen that TT
was the less frequent and LT the most frequent relation. TT and ET together occur 27 times, LT and ZT together 69 times. Thus it seems that the translator only occasionally picked a solution that would provide help to the
reader in activating relevant background assumptions.
4. Discussion of results
4.1. Total transfer
The footnote shown in the Introduction is the only one in the translation, despite the fact that there are several parts where a footnote would
have been useful. There are only three other cases where the translator provides an explanatory note in brackets:
(9) Gazza (33) → „Gazza” [Gascoigne — a ford.] [a ford. = the translator]
(35);
(10) Saint Trevor of England (126) → Angliai Szent Trevor (Trevor Brooking
— a ford.) (152);
(11) Goals have a rarity value that points and runs and sets do not (199) →
A gólok a ritkaságuk folytán rendkívüli értékkel bírnak, amivel nem
vetekedhetnek semmiféle pontok vagy szetek vagy „futások” (a krikett
pontokat éró´ akciója — a ford.) [the actions that earn points in cricket —
the translator] (243).
In these examples we can also notice the inconsistent use of quotation
marks and brackets.
In three further cases, the encyclopaedic content is explicated in the
body of the text:
(12) Flanders and Swann and the Goons, Adrian Mole and Merchant-Ivory,
Francis Durbridge Presents… (49) → Flanders és Swann, a Goons Show
komédiásai, Adrian Mole és a Merchant-Ivory stúdió, Francis Durbridge
bemutatja… [comedians of the Goons Show, Adrian Mole and the
Merchant-Ivory Studio] (56);
(13) … and can tell their Mavis Staples from their Shirley Browns (103) →
… nem keverik össze a Mavis Staple-lemezeiket a Shirley Brownokkal
[can tell their Mavis Staples records from the Shirley Browns] (122).
335
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
However, it can also be seen that the explicitation is not carried out in
all cases: Flanders and Swann, for instance, is not explicated for some reason.
Finally, there is one case when a footballer’s nickname is substituted
by his family name: (14) Merse (215) → Merson (264). Here the substitution
took place in order to make the referent’s identification easier (to save processing effort) and did not entail any loss of logical content, since the original also has an empty logical entry.
4.2. Encyclopaedic transfer
There are 19 expressions in the text where the logical content is lost in
the translation, but the target reader receives help in activating the relevant
encyclopaedic assumptions or the assumptions implicated by the encyclopaedic content. Among these we find expressions relating to English
geography, English institutions, English football, English TV-shows, objects
and idiomatic expressions.
In the case of (15) Sherbet Fountains (40) → pezsgó´por [fizzy powder]
(44), the translator simply substitutes the encyclopaedic content of the original name. The next example is more complex:
(16) … the vast majority of whom are Scousers (31) → … amelynek a nagy
része semleges szurkolókból állt [the majority of which consisted of neutral fans] (32)
This example can be explained in the following way, using Wilson and
Carston’s (2006) convention, whereby encyclopaedic assumptions (EA) as
well as other assumptions are written in small capitals. EA1: THE INHABITANTS
OF LIVERPOOL AND OF THE SURROUNDING AREAS ARE CALLED SCOUSERS. (Source of
definitions: http://en.wikipedia.org.) The explicit content of the sentence
implies in the context of EA1 the following contextual implication CI1: THE
MAJORITY OF THE SPECTATORS OF THE GAME WERE PEOPLE FROM LIVERPOOL AND THE SURROUNDING AREAS. This in the context of EA2: PEOPLE FROM LIVERPOOL AND THE SURROUNDING AREAS ARE ENGLISH PEOPLE implies CI2: THE MAJORITY OF THE SPECTATORS
OF THE GAME WERE ENGLISH PEOPLE. By processing previous parts of the text, the
reader has stored the following contextual assumptions (CA) in memory.
CA1: THE GAME IS PLAYED BY TWO FOREIGN TEAMS. CA2: ENGLISH SPECTATORS OF A
GAME BETWEEN TWO FOREIGN TEAMS ARE NEUTRAL FANS. Now CI2 in the context of
CA1 and CA2 implies CI3: THE MAJORITY OF THE SPECTATORS WERE NEUTRAL FANS.
336
As we see, the translation here does not simply provide the encyclopaedic content of the original, but the end result of the deduction
process carried out with the help of this encyclopaedic content. This way,
the translator has spared the target reader from a certain amount of processing effort. This, at the same time, also means that other possible routes
of the deduction process are not made accessible for the target reader; that
is, the range of possible interpretations (contextual effects) is narrowed
down in the interest of reducing the processing cost. The following is a similar example:
(17) … I lived with my mother and my sister in a small detached house in
the Home Counties. (15) → … én az anyámmal és a húgommal éltem egy
kis házban egy London közeli városkában. [in a small detached house in
a small town near London] (12)
EA1: THE HOME COUNTIES ARE THE COUNTIES BORDERING OR SURROUNDING
LONDON. The explicit content of the sentence in the context of EA1 implies
CI1: THE NARRATOR LIVES IN A COUNTY NEAR LONDON. This has the following analytical implication AI1: THE NARRATOR LIVES NEAR LONDON. By processing previous parts of the text, the reader has stored in memory CA1: THE NARRATOR
LIVES IN A SMALL TOWN. Thus AI1 in the context of CA1 will imply CI2: THE NARRATOR LIVES IN A SMALL TOWN NEAR LONDON.
In the following example, there are two relevant encyclopaedic
assumptions that the original sentence activates. EA1: THE KOP IS THE STAND IN
LIVERPOOL FC’S STADIUM HOUSING THE CLUB’S DIEHARD SUPPORTERS. EA2: THE
STRETFORD END IS THE STAND IN MANCHESTER UNITED’S STADIUM HOUSING THE CLUB’S
DIEHARD SUPPORTERS. The source reader also has access to EA3: LIVERPOOL AND
MANCHESTER UNITED ARE TWO OF THE BIG FOOTBALL TEAMS. Then the explicit content of the sentence in the context of these three assumptions will imply
CI1: …UNLESS ONE STANDS AMONG THE DIEHARD SUPPORTERS OF THE OTHER BIG CLUBS,
which is roughly what the target language version says:
(18) … unless one stands on the North Bank, or the Kop, or the Stretford
End (77) → … hacsak nem az Északi Sáncon vagy bármely másik nagycsapat „táborában” szurkol [in the “camp” of any other big team] (91)
What makes the next example interesting is that the end of the deduction process is an assumption containing the colloquial name of an institution bound to Hungarian culture, the SZTK (acronym for Workers’ Union
337
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
Social Security Centre), which by activating the encyclopaedic contents
associated with the name implies the following assumption, presumably
also implied by the source language expression: THE READING GLASSES IN QUESTION WERE OF A CHEAP AND NOT PARTICULARLY GOOD-LOOKING KIND:
(19) black-framed Brains-style National Health reading glasses (54) →
fekete keretes Brains-féle esztéká olvasószemüveg (62)
A further point of some interest is that in the same sentence the encyclopaedic content of the expression Brains-style is not explicated, although
the Hungarian target reader most probably does not possess the background assumption that Brains was a character in an animated TV series
called Thunderbirds, shown on British TV in the 1960s, who wore characteristic black-framed glasses. A further example where an encyclopaedic
assumption is made accessible in some way in the target text:
(20) I have already dropped as many aitches as I can — the only ones left
in my diction have dug themselves too far into definite articles to be winkled out (48) → Mindig buzgón gyilkoltam a magánhangzókat a
beszédemben, bár némelyik annyira belém ivódott, hogy így is
megmenekült a haláltól… [I’ve been ardently murdering the vowels in my
speech, although some have pervaded me so much that they escaped
death] (55)
Here the relevant background assumption is that dropping one’s aitches is a characteristic of uneducated speakers. Now, since in the target language, Hungarian, uneducated speakers, instead of dropping aitches, may
rather blur some vowel sounds, to preserve the encyclopaedic assumption,
the translator had to alter the logical meaning in this fashion.
The next three examples are rather more straightforward, making
explicit a single encyclopaedic assumption:
(21) Cockney (50) → londoni akcentus [London accent] (57);
(22) … was as happy as Larry inventing his gruesome and improbable lies
(61) → boldogan találta ki vérfagylaló és valószerú´tlen hazugságait [happily inventing…] (71);
(23) Proper writers go on author tours, and appear as guests on Wogan …
(216) → Aztán meg minden valamirevaló író felolvasó turnékra jár, vagy
meghívják a tévébe beszélgetni… [on TV] (265)
338
4.3. Logical transfer
This is the most numerous category where, all the target language
expressions being literal translations of their originals, the target reader
receives no help from the translator in working out the intended contextual
effects. This group includes place names, personal names, expressions
related to football, English culture, institutions, social groups, TV shows and
magazines. Here are some examples:
(24) … the stadium itself, with its beautiful art deco stands and its Jacob
Epstein busts… (21) → … s mintha maga a stadion is — a maga gyönyörú´ szecessziós lelátóival és Jacob Epstein mellszobraival… (18)
The missing EA: JACOB EPSTEIN
WORKING MAINLY IN
WAS AN
AMERICAN-BORN
MODERN SCULPTOR
BRITAIN.
(25) Although the temptation to plunge into a warm bath containing dissolved essence of Kenneth Wolstenholme is always with me… (29) → Bár
mindig eró´s a kísértés, hogy beleüljek egy forró kádba, amely Kenneth
Wolstenholme szétolvadt esszenciájával van tele… (29)
EA: KENNETH WOLSTENHOLME WAS BBC TELEVISION’S FIRST FOOTBALL COMMENTATOR IN THE
1950S AND 1960S.
(26) … and made everything else look like so many Vauxhall Vivas. (37)
→ … mellettük minden más unalmas Vauxhall Vivának túńt. (40)
EA: THE VAUXHALL VIVA WAS A MODEL OF CARS PRODUCED BY VAUXHALL MOTORS
FROM
1963 TO 1979.
(27) Rumbelows Cup (39) → Rumbelows kupa (43)
EA: RUMBELOWS CUP
BETWEEN
WAS THE NAME OF THE
ENGLISH FOOTBALL LEAGUE CUP
1990 AND 1992.
(28) In a way nobody can blame any of us, the Mockneys or the cod Irish,
the black wannabees or the pseudo Sloanes. (49) → Igazából senki sem vádolhat bennünket — feketemajmolókat és ál-Sloane-okat (55)
339
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
EA: THE TERM SLOANES ORIGINALLY REFERRED TO THE YOUNG UPPER- AND UPPERMIDDLE-CLASS MEN AND WOMEN LIVING IN WEST-LONDON’S FASHIONABLE SLOANE
SQUARE.
(29) … it was as if Elsie Tanner had walked into the Crossroads Motel (69)
→ … mintha Elsie Tanner besétált volna a Crossroads Motelbe (82)
EA: ELSIE TANNER WAS THE MAIN CHARACTER OF A SOAP OPERA CALLED
“CORONATION STREET”, SHOWN ON BRITISH TV FROM 1960 TO 1984. THE FICTIONAL
CROSSROADS MOTEL WAS THE MAIN LOCATION OF THE SOAP OPERA SERIES “CROSSROADS”,
SHOWN ON BRITISH TV FROM 1964 TO 1988.
(30) And I’m not talking about the deaths of Heysel or Hillsborough or
Ibrox or Bradford… (72) → És most természetesen nem a Heysel stadionban
vagy Hillsboroughban vagy Ibroxban vagy Bradfordban bekövetkezett halálokról
beszélek… (85)
EA: HILLSBOROUGH, IBROX AND BRADFORD WERE SCENES OF FOOTBALL DISASTERS
OF THE SAME MAGNITUDE AS THAT AT HEYSEL.
(31) the Cannonball Kid of television drama (147) → a televíziós dráma
Puskagolyó Kölyke (178)
EA: CANNONBALL KID WAS A CHARACTER OBSESSED WITH FOOTBALL IN A POPULAR
1980S.
COMIC STRIP IN THE
(32) … return to the Amstrad refreshed (210) → … felfrissülve térhetnék
vissza az Amstradomhoz (258)
EA: THE TERM AMSTRAD DESIGNATES A WORD PROCESSING MACHINE.
(33) … queuing for a ticket on Freddie Laker’s Skytrain (215) → … álltam
sorba jegyért Freddie Laker Skytrain-jére (264)
EA: THE
FREDDIE L AKER’S SKYTRAIN DESIGNATES A BRITISH
AVIATION COMPANY LAUNCHED IN 1977 BY ENTREPRENEUR FREDDIE L AKER.
EXPRESSION
PRIVATE
4.4. Zero transfer
This group includes target language expressions which are different
from their originals in both logical and encyclopaedic content. Among
340
them, we find expressions related to places, football, TV shows, films and
objects.
The difference in logical content may be the result of a misinterpretation of the original by the translator, as in (34) and (35):
(34) Esso World Cup coin collections (38) → „Esso” vb-gombfocikészletek
[Esso World Cup button soccer sets] (40)
EA: THE ESSO WORLD CUP COIN COLLECTION WAS A COLLECTION OF 30 COINS
ISSUED BY THE ESSO OIL COMPANY TO COMMEMORATE THE 1970 FOOTBALL WORLD CUP,
FEATURING PORTRAITS OF THE MEMBERS OF THE ENGLISH NATIONAL TEAM.
(35) an entire family, known to everyone as the Munsters due to a somewhat outlandish and unfortunate physical appearance (144) → egy teljes
család, amelyet mindenki csak „munsterieknek” nevezett a némiképp
külföldies és szerencsétlen külsejük miatt [known to everyone as the people
from Munster] (175)
EA: “THE MUNSTERS” WAS A HORROR COMEDY SERIES SHOWN ON AMERICAN TV IN
THE 1960S, DEPICTING THE LIFE OF A FAMILY OF MONSTERS.
In (36) the translator opted for keeping the original English expression,
which results in a loss of both logical and encyclopaedic content:
(36) an Old Firm game (129) → egy Old Firm-meccsen (155)
EA: THE TERM OLD FIRM IS AN EPITHET OF THE GAMES PLAYED BETWEEN
GLASGOW’S TWO RIVAL TEAMS CELTIC AND RANGERS.
In (37) and (38) the translator simply left out an expression altogether
which, of course, results in a complete loss of all content:
(37) ... squirm through a packed Dell (42) → … elvergó´döm… [I squirm
through] (47)
EA: THE DELL WAS SOUTHAMPTON FC’S STADIUM BETWEEN 1898 AND 1991.
(38) … a twelve-hour day, like Gordon Gekko’s lunch, was for wimps (201)
→ … a tizenkét órás munkanap a nyápicoknak szólt [a twelve-hour day was for
wimps] (246)
EA: GORDON GEKKO WAS A MAIN CHARACTER
INFAMOUS LINE SAID “LUNCH IS FOR WIMPS.”
IN THE FILM
WALL STREET,
WHOSE
341
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
5. Conclusion
On the basis of the above it can be established that the translator had
no coherent strategy to compensate for the lack of background assumptions in the target reader’s cognitive environment. Even in the case of
expressions of the same type, for instance TV shows, various solutions were
applied, often within one and the same sentence. It seems that in the case
of expressions where the translator had access to the necessary encyclopaedic assumptions, he also provided help to the target reader, while in
cases where he himself had no ready access to the encyclopaedic assumptions needed, he did not even try to recover them. In other words, one has
the impression that the translator’s solutions were motivated not so much
by an intention to reconstruct all the contextual effects of the original and to
optimise the target reader’s level of processing effort needed to work out
these effects, but by an intention to minimise the amount of his own translation effort. This translation, therefore, does not satisfy the principle of optimal resemblance as formulated by Gutt (1991).
References
Gutt, E-A. 1991. Translation and Relevance. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Sperber, D., D. Wilson. 1986/1995. Relevance. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wilson, D., Carston, R. 2006. Metaphor, Relevance and the ‘Emergent Property’
Issue. Mind and Language, Vol.21 No. 3, pp. 404-433.
Sources
Hornby, N. 1996. Fever Pitch. London: Indigo.
Hornby, N. 2002. Fociláz. Budapest: Európa Kiadó. Translated by: Miklós M. Nagy.
POLITICAL - IDEOLOGICAL TRANSLATIONS OF ROBERT
BURNS’ POETRY IN THE SOVIET UNION
NATALIA VID
University of Maribor
Abstract: The paper compares Robert Burns’ poems with their Russian
translation, published in the Soviet Union by a famous Russian poet and
translator, Samuil Marshak, in 1947. The analysis of the translation reveals the
presence of distortions of the original text, dictated by the ideology dominant at
the time.
1. Introduction
Ever since the 1930s, the communist regime established in Russia after
the October Revolution regulated literary expression through “socialist realism” - a new literary program, invented in 1934, with the purpose of defining each aspect of a literary work written or published in the Soviet Union,
including its topic, style, preface, etc.
This was done with the help of a system of strict rules about a text’s
appropriateness and adaptation to the regime’s demands. According to the
new ideological propaganda, literary works were expected to extol a new,
better lifestyle of the communist society in the Soviet Union and to expose
an unpleasant picture of the miserable life of workers and peasants in capitalist countries.
One of the most important aims of this program was to introduce to
the Soviet people foreign authors as supporters of the communist regime
and offer them newly adapted interpretations of famous literary works.
Upon the proposal of Lunacharski (the first “narkom prosveshenija”)1, each
literary work written by a foreign author and published in the Soviet Union
had to contain a special preface which explained the “correct” meaning of
the work to its Soviet readers. This should be considered as a part of ideological pressure.
Soviet critics considered most world-famous artists to be spokesmen
for a socialist regime. Their works had to be interpreted as communist manifestoes in which an individual’s protest against capitalism was put on the
first place. Writers’ biographies and their literary works were adapted and
344
even changed according to this new scheme. Those works which could not
be “properly” adapted were put on the black list and forbidden. Of course,
this situation was extremely difficult for writers and translators. They had to
adapt their literary talent to this new ideology, and they were forced to work
under the strong pressure of the Soviet communist regime. We have to keep
this in mind when we analyze ideological translations made in the Soviet
Union at that time. This is not about how the translators wanted to translate,
but about how they had to translate.
It is interesting, even horrifying, to see how ideology exerts pressures
on literary translation. A literary text undergoes a series of transformations
or distortions, depending on the stance or ideology of the author. My paper
is meant to highlight the dilemma that faces a translator when his/her ideology contradicts the author’s or when s/he has to adopt techniques that are
different from those of the author’s. Such differences can be construed as
deviation, changes or adoption of an ideology which is at variance with
what the author intends. Poems by the Scottish poet Robert Burns are a
good example to demonstrate how a literary translation is compromised by
ideology. His poems were translated by one of the most famous and talented translators in the Soviet Union, Samuel Marshak, who also translated
Shakespeare. Marshak’s translations were extremely popular and widespread in the Soviet Union. Even nowadays they are considered to be the
best translations of Robert Burns’s poetry, although they offer a clear picture
of the ideological adaptation of literary texts.
2. “Soviet” Robert Burns
The popularity of Burns’ poetry in the Soviet Union reached its peak in
1930, when the conception of “progressive culture” was defined. Robert
Burns was lucky. Soviet critics had no doubts about him — he was called “a
progressive poet of the revolution”, and the process of his canonization in
the Soviet Union started. His poems were pronounced acceptable and useful for the new communist ideology, but of course they had to be “properly” translated. As the best examples of Burns’ democratic spirit and his connection with peasants, workers and beggars, two poems were always quoted: “Is there for honest poverty” and “Love and Liberty”. They were used to
show how much Burns was concerned about the poor and how he
dreamed about democracy and equal rights all over the world. Burns was
presented to Soviet readers as a communist poet, and this conception of his
345
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
poetry, as revolutionary and purely communist, remained unchanged for
many years. Because of a completely fabricated biography and his deliberately misinterpreted main ideas, he became enormously popular in the
Soviet Union..
Burns’ true biography could not be considered to serve as a good
example of a communist oriented writer, especially the fact that Burns had
many illegitimate children and never participated in any revolutionary
organization. So, M. Gutner, a famous Soviet critic, wrote an article about
Burns’ life (1938: 5-20). He stressed those features of his biography which
favoured its “proper” interpretation. Especially important for his interpretation of Burns’ biography was the fact that Burns was born to the poor family of a common farmer, who had nothing to do with the aristocratic circles
strongly criticized in Soviet literature. Gutner reminded Soviet readers that
the main reasons why Burns could not assert himself successfully as a poet
in England were his sympathies with the French Revolution and his open
protest against English aristocrats. He also stated that Burns actually participated in the French revolution and was put in jail because of it. Burns was
presented as a fighter for human rights. Gutner also allowed himself to add
some inventions to Burns’ biography in order to stress his connection with
the poor and the revolutionary circles. For example, Gutner asserted that
Burns wrote his first poems as a young lad, while he was working hard in
the fields and that he gave them to his countrymen who were impressed
and dismayed by his bravery (Gutner 1938: 9). This was completely false.
There were no dates which could confirm that Burns actually gave his
poems to his countrymen. Another very interesting addition was the statement that Burns started his poetic work with satires on the church and the
priests. Since Soviet ideology did not accept any kind of religion or the
church as an independent institution, and that during the Soviet regime
most churches were destroyed, it was very important for Soviet critics to
present Burns as an Antichristian. Gutner wrote that Burns criticized and
hated priests, who were responsible for the poor people’s poverty. As an
example of an Antichristian poem, he mentioned “Holy Willie’s prayer”
(1938: 14). It is true that in this poem Burns makes fun of a clumsy and
stingy priest, but we can hardly say that it is written with hatred or dismissively. It is simply a satirical poem, free of any ideological ground.
The first poems translated by Marshak were published in the Molodaja
gvardija (a new Soviet newspaper) together with an article by A. Anikst, an
346
expert in English literature (1939: 43 -58), who also stressed Burns’ origins
that brought him close to the commoners. Just like Gutner, Anikst stated
that Burns not only sympathized with the French revolution but also participated in it and was thrown into jail (1939: 45). Anikst mentioned a Scottish
circle of people who approved of and supported French revolutionaries and
the head of this circle was supposed to be Burns (again a completely fabricated claim).
Anikst placed Burns among the most progressive fighters for democratic rights. According to him, Burns’ poetry played a very important role in
the development of English literature, because he replaced the old classic
forms and themes with a new one (1939: 50). This is partly true, but Anikst
exaggerated. Burns did not cause drastic changes in the development of the
English literature; he did not influence the forms or the themes dominant in
the English literature.
One more fabricated claim mentioned by Anikst was that Burns’ poetry grew out of folklore (1939: 56). Burns did use material from folk songs
and imitated their form and spirit, but his poetry cannot be compared with
folk poetry, as he just used parts of it for his own purposes.
Burns was also presented as a victim of the upper classes. Anikst
wrote that poverty and poor people’s sufferings forced Burns to take to
drinking (1939: 57). Society was supposed to be guilty for his sorrows,
because he felt helpless and could not change anything. Grief and society’s
cruelty were the main reasons for his early death. But because a national
poet could not be presented as a complete pessimist and sufferer, Anikst
stressed his cheerful nature which helped him to cope with all obstacles
with a smile on his face.
3. Burns and Marshak
The task of translating Burns´ poetry was assigned to S.J. Marshak
(1887-1964), a famous dramatist and a poet himself. He started his work in
1930 and his first book was published in 1947. Robert Burns and, later,
Scottish national songs became his life’s work. He devoted twenty years of
hard work to Burns’ poetry. His last book of translations contained 215
poems.
In his translations Marshak followed two aims: the promotion of social
democratic themes, according to the new established canons, and the
weakening of the Scottish folk spirit.
347
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
It is obvious that Marshak chose his poems very carefully. He never
translated poems that contained religious motives (unless they had a satirical tinge) or poems addressed to the poet’s friends, if they belonged to the
aristocratic circles. “Soviet” Burns could not keep any connections with the
upper classes. Poems devoted to the then political situation in Scotland and
England were also ignored. It is a sad fact, because these poems belong to
the most extensive and the most original part of Burns’ literary heritage.
Marshak translated songs and ballads in which peasants’ lives and customs were described and poems in which nationality, patriotism and poor
people’s sufferings were particularly stressed. Burns’ epigrams, which did
not possess any particular literary value in comparison with Pushkin’s or
Byron’s, were also carefully translated. This means that ideological canonization was taken by Marshak into consideration from the very beginning.
Creating his translations, Marshak did not allow himself to change the
texts completely. He wanted to keep the original meaning and tried not to
alter the poetic and thematic structure of the poems. However, he shortened the poem “The Holy Fair”, translating just 14 out of its 22 lines, and
made some synonymic changes: morn —> ‘day’; caller air —> ‘frost’;
chantin’ —> ‘singing’; lightsomely —> ‘joyfully breathing’; silent —> ‘without noise’; real judges —> ‘earth judges’ and so on. Such changes did not
disturb the rhythm and the style of the poem and were used only to stress
the images. Marshak translated the poems very correctly and did his best to
save Burns’ style and images, but his main task was to make Burns acceptable to the Soviet censorship, which meant to stress his democratic views.
In his translations, Marshak never mentioned God or anything connected with religion, even names from the Bible. Soviet ideology did not accept
any kind of religion and Marshak presented Burns as an atheist who
accused religion (not just the church) for the commoners’ sufferings, and
who unveiled its antinational essence.
In the poem “For a’ that and a’ that”, the philosophical conclusion of
the original, that man’s dignity does not depend on his position and fortune,
was transformed into a typical communist slogan: “The poor are those who
possess all moral priorities”. The last line in the poem, “The rank is but the
guinea-stamp / The man’s the gowd for a’ that!” (Burns 1996: 7-8), was
translated, “Áîãàòñòâî ø òà ì ï í à çî ë îòî ì , í î çî ë îòî ì û ñà ì è” [ “wealth
is just a stamp on the gold, but we are the gold ourselves”] (Marshak 1964:
8). This nuance in the translation is not easy to see: “the man” and “we our-
348
selves” mean almost the same, but the full context created by Marshak
stresses the main idea that “we, the poor, resist the rich”. The original title
of the poem, “For a’ that and a’ that”, was translated “×åñòíàÿ áåä í îñòü”
[“Honest Poverty”].
There is one more example in the same poem, which shows how
carefully it was adapted to the new ideological scheme. The last line, “A
prince can make a belted knight / A marquis, duke, and a’ that” (Burns 1996:
17-18), was translated, “Êî ð îëü ëàêåÿ ñâî åãî í à ç í à÷èë ãåíåðàë îì ” [“a
king made his servant a general”] (Marsak 1964: 32-33). Instead of the word
“knight”, the equivalent of the word “servant” was used. Marshak wanted to
emphasize that a king could not have knights but just servants. The original
Russian word “ëàêåé” / “lakej” used in the translation has a degrading
meaning, denoting here “a lick-spittle”.
The images of beggars and the poor in Marshak’s translations were
idealized. For example, in the poem “The Jolly Beggars”, the word mountebank was translated as a “ê ë îó í” [‘clown’], but in the original poem it was
used with the meaning of “swindler”
In this way, with just one word, Marshak changed the original characteristic of the image. Beggars are not robbers, but just honest, amusing fellows.
The best example of the canonization and making heroes out of beggars and swindlers is the poem “Macpherson’s Farewell”, in which a highway-robber is transformed into a national hero and a revolutionary. This
poem was changed almost completely. The lines, “Farewell, Ye dungeons
dark and strong / The wretch’s destinie!” (Burns 1996: 1-2) were translated
“Ï ð è âåò, âàì òþðüìó êî ð îëÿ, ãäå æèçíü âëà÷àò ðàáû” [‘Hello, the prisons of the king, where slaves suffer’] (Marshak 1964: 1-2).
In the translation, such adjectives as “wantonly”, “dauntingly”, “rantingly” are absent. The main occupation of the hero, a robber, was changed
into “war”. The first line, “Oh! What is death but parting breath?” (Burns
1996: 24), was translated “Â ï îëÿõ âîéíû ñðåä è ì å÷åé âñòðå÷àë ÿ
ñìåðòü íå ðàç” [‘In the fields of war, among swords, I met death many
times’] (Marshak 1964: 16-17). The original idea was completely changed,
because the Soviet Robert Burns could not glorify robbers and beggars.
In Burns’ satirical poems that make fun of aristocrats and sometimes
of the church, Marshak omits the reference to the first person singular if the
author talks about religious feelings. For example, the last line of the poem
349
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
“To a Louse, On Seeing it on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church” is changed in the
translation. Instead of “What airs in dress an’gait wad lea’e us, and ev’n
Devotion” (Burns 1996: 45-46), “Î , êàê áû ñòàëè ì û ò å ð ï è ì û è
ñêðîì í û” [‘We would become more modest and patient’] (Marshak 1964:
45), was used. The poet, who was pronounced to be a democrat and a
communist, could not talk about any feelings connected with religion in the
first person singular. I have already mentioned that the new communist government tried to destroy everything connected with the church and did not
accept any kind of religion.
The same “trick” can be observed in the translation of “For a’that and
a’ that” where the first line in the couplet was cut out because of the word
“pray”.
Again, the same can be noticed in the translation of the poem “To a
Mountain Daisy, on turning one down with the plough, in April, 1786”: in the
Russian equivalent of the lines “Till wrench’d of ev’ry stay but HEAV’N / He,
ruin’d, sink” (Burns 1996: 45-46), the word “heaven” was cut out.
Another important characteristic of Marshak’s translations is the omission of any mention of Scotland. This could be understood from a translator’s point of view, because sometimes mentioning foreign names makes
the comprehension of a poem more difficult for the reader and demands
additional comments or explanations. But the omission of Scotland became
a characteristic feature of Marshak’s translations. The events mentioned in
the poems happen “nowhere”. They could happen anywhere, at any time,
so that the reader could easier identify with them more easily. Thus
Scotland’s poet became an international poet who struggled for human
rights all over the world, not just in Scotland. This misrepresentation
destroys the idea that Burns is national Scottish poet. Love and care for the
motherland, images which were very important for the proper comprehension of Burns’ poetry, were absent in the translations. Burns was no longer
just a Scottish, but a “world” poet. In the translation of the poem “Scots wha
hae”, for example, it is impossible to understand that the main idea is an
appeal to the Scottish king. He is not even mentioned in the translation.
The names of rivers, lakes, cities and countries are also omitted. In the
poem “Lines written on a Bank-note”, “For lake o’thee I leave this muchloved shore / Never perhaps to greet old Scotland more!” (Burns, 1996: 3536), Marshak translated Scotland as “ð îä è í à” [‘motherland’].
350
In the translation of the poem “Elegy on Peg Nicholson” the lines, “But
now she’s floating down the Nith / And past the Mouth o’ Carin” (Burns,
1996: 56-58), the name Carin is cut out, only the “ðåêà” [‘river’] is mentioned.
In the poem “Go fetch me a pint o’ wine”, the name “Leith” is not mentioned in the translation.
In the Russian version of the poem “Jolly Beggars”, the reference to the
Scottish pipe is absent.
The same thing happened in the case of the poem “The Answer”, in
which the fourth line, “That I for poor auld Scotland sake” (Burns 1996: 54)
is translated, “Î ä í î é ì å÷òîé ñ òåõ ïîð ÿ æèë, ñëóæèòü ñòðàíå ïî ìåðå
ñèë” [‘The only dream of my life is to serve the country as long as I could’]
(Marshak 1964: 54); Scotland is replaced by the Russian word for “country”.
In the same poem Burns says that he is proud because to be Scottish,
“A Scot still, but blot still I knew no higher place” (Burns 1996: 61-62).
Marshak translated the line as if the words “Scot” and “peasant” were synonyms: “Ø îòëàíäñêîé, êðåñòüÿíñêî é ï î ð îäîé áûë ÿ ãî ðä ” [‘I am proud
because of my Scottish, peasant nature’] (Marshak 1964: 75-76).
The poem “The Tree of Liberty” was inspired by the French revolution,
but Burns had in mind just some future revolution in England; the symbol of
revolution was interpreted differently by Marshak: “Syne let us pray, auld
England may Sure plant this far-famed tree, man” (Burns 1996: 41-42) was
translated “Çàáóäóò ðàáñòî âî è í óæäó íàðîäû è êðàÿ, áðàò” [‘The
nations and places would forget about the poverty and slavery, brother’]
(Marsak, 1964: 45-46).
4. Conclusion
Marshak “cleaned” Burns’ poetry of its Scottish “coloration”. He did
everything to make his readers forget that Burns was a Scottish national
poet. An important feature of Marshak’s translations was that he did not
write in dialect, even though the Russian language offers a wide range of
dialectical forms. Burns even had to write special comments on his poems,
otherwise they would not have been understood in the other regions of
Britain. However, Marshak translated from the Scottish dialect into the standard Russian language. He made it grammatically perfect and all Russian
critics praised his laconic, melodic language. But Marshak never used even
351
LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG
one dialect word in his translations, so that the original folk spirit of Burns’
poetry was lost.
Marshak followed the tradition of Robert Burns’ translations formed
during the nineteenth century. He summarized the experiences of
Shepkina-Kuprina, Mihajlov, Veinberg and created an adequate, acceptable
image of Robert Burns for the Soviet culture. Marshak’s translation
remained the best translation of Burns for almost half a century (1940-1980).
The next generation of translators faced a difficult task, because Marshak
had created a “Russian / Soviet” Robert Burns and Russian readers were not
ready yet to accept any other variants.
Note
1. Lunacharski, the first Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment, was in charge of education and of the Soviet state’s first censorship system.
References
Anikst, A. 1939. Robert Burns. Sojuz Pechatj: Moskva.
Burns, R. 1996. Selected poems. Penguin Popular Classics: London.
Burns, R. 1964. Izbrannoje/ v perevode Marshaka. Sojuz Pechjatj: Moscow.
Burns, R. 1982. The poetical works. Raduga: Moscow
Gutner, M. 1938. “Robert Burns”, in Literaturnaja gazeta ¹ 4 . Moskva.

Linguistic flim

Transcription

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